THE LIFE SAVERS OF WORLD WAR II

Emanuel “Manny” Schoenbach, a physician-researcher, battles wartime infectious diseases with careful epidemiology and wonder drugs in this vivid remembrance.

Wendy Reasenberg (Manny Schoenbach’s daughter) and her niece Anna Kade Schoenbach, both science writers, lightly fictionalize Manny’s true-life exploits during World War II in this narrative. The story opens in 1941 with Manny and other Harvard Medical School epidemiologists flying into Halifax to cope with a triple outbreak of diphtheria, scarlet fever, and meningitis. There, he helps implement a tracing and inoculation program that quells the diphtheria epidemic and successfully treats meningitis cases with new sulfa drugs. After the Pearl Harbor attack, he joins the Army Epidemiological Board and reports to Fort Meade, Maryland, where he does more work on meningitis, an often-fatal bacterial ailment that could decimate troop transports. He conducts a grueling study that requires soldier-volunteers to spend two hours a day with cotton balls stuffed part-way down their throats to collect bacterial samples and ascertains that prophylactic dosing with sulfa drugs prevents infection—an insight that wins him a commendation ribbon. Later chapters follow Manny’s post-war research studying novel antibiotics, discovering that the cancer drug diamidine can cure blastomycosis (an often fatal fungal infection), and saving his own son from the autoimmune disease erythema multiforme with an experimental hormone treatment. The authors’ treatment of Manny’s brief life—he died in 1952 at the age of 40—includes intriguing tutorials on diseases, conveyed in novelistic prose that’s dense with atmospherics. (“‘Meningitis,’ he said, lighting a cigarette and leaning forward. ‘While it is not generally known, in World War I, meningitis killed as many soldiers as bullets did.’”) They also colorfully depict the wartime mood, from hectic relocations and housing searches to the gung-ho enthusiasm of mission-driven doctors. (“We can knock the stuffing out of these three rotten bums,” says Manny to his Halifax germ-fighting team.) The result is a captivating account of two-fisted epidemiology on the march.

A rousing saga of the anti-microbial front, full of compelling scientific lore and energetic writing.