tory with introduction to American ways provided by his colleagues,
especially Charles Henry Bunting and John Lawrence Yates, who were
working under Flexner. Noguchi beamed when Yates termed him the
"yellow peril"; he enjoyed stumbling through limericks; he entered
the seventh heaven when he was made, with appropriate ceremonies at
a nearby tavern, a charter member of the "Society for the Liberation
of Captive Balloons." He liberated his full share. He was sensitive,
naive, generous to a fault, save where his honors were concerned, a
spendthrift in time, money, and energy, a man of extraordinary drive
and industry. All those who were privileged to work with or near him
became fond of him; we appreciated his childlike simplicity, directness,
and the fire-ball intensity of his purpose, and forgave his foibles and
weaknesses. He did so desire to be "Hideyo" (great-man-of-the-
world), his adopted name.
   Noguchi's work with Flexner on snake venoms was a well-organized
study extending over a number of years and culminating in a distin-
guished monograph published by the Carnegie Institution of Washing-
ton (i9o9). A detailed description of hemolysis produced by venoms
and a knowledge of the specific damage to the endothelium of blood
vessels, resulting in edema and hemorrhage, were the significant con-
tributions. Calmette, pre-eminent in this field, in his monograph (1907)
expressed appreciation of the work of Flexner and Noguchi, but he
gave credit to Henry Sewall, then at the University of Michigan, for
the earliest (i887) preventive inoculation against snake venoms, fol-
lowing repeated inoculation of sublethal doses of rattlesnake venom
into pigeons. On the basis of his venom studies, Noguchi received a
grant from the Carnegie Institution to work a year with Madsen in
Copenhagen. There he learned much, especially quantitative methods,
and with Madsen produced in goats an antivenin against rattlesnake
venom.
   The discovery of Treponema pallidum as the causative agent of
 syphilis by Schaudinn (1905) and Wassermann's application of Bor-
 det's complement fixation reaction to the diagnosis of this disease
 (i906) led many, including Noguchi, into detailed serological studies.
 These in turn increased his interest in spirochaetes, and shortly he was
 attempting to cultivate these organisms from every source. Soon he
 reported the cultivation of virulent T. pallidum with production of
 specific skin lesions and positive Wassermann reactions in monkeys
 and chimpanzees following the injection of his cultivated organisms.


The Atlantic Seaboard


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