We presume this to be true thanks to the discovery last spring of a trove of teaching slides in a storage room in Carnegie Science Hall, many prepared by Sawyer, a 1913 Bates graduate, when he worked in an Army lab in the French city during the war.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Sawyer\u2019s few dozen slides, each with his handwritten \u201cW.H.S.,\u201d feature a veritable What\u2019s What of deadly pathogens that cause diseases like meningitis, diphtheria, and anthrax. (Yikes! Anthrax!? But don\u2019t worry: All the samples are \u201cfixed,\u201d meaning dead, inert, and non-revivable.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n Malachowsky, who worked with a colleague to scan and digitize the old slides, says that the stained bacteria on some of the professionally prepared slides have faded over time. But the bacteria fixed on Sawyer\u2019s slides are still visible more than a century later. \u201cSome of that is luck,\u201d she says. \u201cSome are techniques. Either way, he did a good job.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n Not that Sawyer\u2019s skill would surprise anyone. A Phi Beta Kappa graduate, he earned a master\u2019s degree from Cornell before attending one of the Army\u2019s new laboratory schools, at Yale<\/a>, to learn the basics of bacteriology and pathology as the country ramped up to enter the Great War. After the war, he served as a Bates biology professor, retiring in 1962.<\/p>\n\n\n\n After training, Sawyer, by then a sergeant in the U.S. Army, was deployed to the port of Marseille, where one of the Army\u2019s 11 \u201cbase sections\u201d were funneling war supplies from incoming ships to the front lines, everything from tins of corned beef and instant coffee to trench mortars and machine guns.<\/p>\n\n\n\n These clips show what life was like in November 1918 where William Sawyer was stationed: U.S. Army Base Section No. 6. in Marseille, France, including unloading freight, such as rations and vehicles \u2014 and playing some basketball.<\/em><\/span>\n \n\n\n In Marseille, Sawyer joined the section\u2019s laboratory, one of some 300 labs that the Army aggressively deployed throughout Europe to identify and fight the infectious diseases that always accompany armed forces.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Among soldiers, the one-two punch during World War I was influenza and bacterial pneumonia, the latter often as a secondary infection. American combat deaths in World War I totaled 53,402, but another 45,000 soldiers died<\/a> of influenza and pneumonia by the end of 1918.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Meanwhile, sexually transmitted diseases cost the Army some seven million person-days and led to 10,000 men being discharged. Indeed, among Sawyer\u2019s slides, Gonococci<\/em> specimens are by far the most common, says Anna Marie Bowsher, a research technician who worked with Malachowsky to image the slides, preserving the evidence of Sawyer\u2019s wartime work for future generations.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cThe slides themselves are interesting but you don’t really know anything until you put a slide under the microscope,\u201d says Bowsher. \u201cEven today, there’s a lot of things that we don’t know until we look under a microscope. I think that’s really cool.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n Bowsher is also captivated by the fact that Sawyer cared enough about his work to bring the slides back to Bates. \u201cI can’t imagine ever having the opportunity to do what he did \u2014 work in a military base lab \u2014 so it was great to live vicariously through the experience\u201d of imaging the slides.<\/p>\n\n\n\n All those Gonococci <\/em>slides suggest that the disease was widely present at Base Section No. 6, says Bowsher, who works in the Bates lab of Travis Gould and Paula Schlax<\/a>. Only the \u201chighest ranking officer\u201d slide has such a detail on its label.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Maybe, says Bowsher with a chuckle, Sawyer notated the officer on his label to record a brush with fame, \u201clike seeing a celebrity at the mall. Maybe he was like, \u2018I got to interact with someone I never would have met otherwise by taking his sample and looking at it.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n (And who exactly was the \u201chighest-ranking officer\u201d with the clap? An educated guess says it may have been Col. Melvin W. Rowell, who, as Army records indicate, stepped down from his base section command in March 1919, when the station was still active.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n Captivated by the science and history of Sawyer\u2019s slides, Kennedy has been pondering \u201cwhat it means to find these slides, many prepared during the 1918 pandemic, during today\u2019s pandemic.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n From a biomedical perspective, \u201cwe\u2019re in a very different place now.\u201d In 1918, scientists didn\u2019t yet know about viruses. \u201cNow, we saw accurate illustrations of the new coronavirus even before it was detected in the U.S.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n But politically, \u201cwe’re in a similar place\u201d when it comes to the pandemic, Kennedy says. \u201cIn 1918, the mask became a political symbol, and there were riots about it \u2014 which always seems to happen with disease: People tend to get frustrated and turn on one another politically.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n These days, Kennedy is teaching students the newest concepts in neuroscience, such as the physical underpinnings of our memories and emotions. He has pondered what slides Sawyer probably created in Marseille but did not<\/em> keep for his Bates teaching.<\/p>\n\n\n\n In 1918, school was still out on what organism was causing the pandemic. \u201cThere was considerable debate in the scientific community, mostly centered at Rockefeller Institute<\/a>, about the cause of influenza,\u201d says Kennedy.<\/p>\n\n\n\n At the time, many scientists thought that Pfeiffer’s bacillus caused influenza because the bacteria was found in the lungs of people sick with the flu. (Scientists were so confident of the bacterial cause that Pfeiffer\u2019s was renamed Haemophilus influenzae.)<\/em> But as it turned out that the bacterium was only a secondary invader after the influenza virus.<\/p>\n\n\n\n For a scientist during wartime, the ability to culture and mount bacteria on a slide for examination under a microscope \u201cwas seen as a critical part of the health system,\u201d says Kennedy. With Sawyer in Marseille at the height of the pandemic, there\u2019s little question that he was trying to culture H. influenzae<\/em>. Given the overall high quality of Sawyer\u2019s other slides, says Kennedy, \u201cI\u2019m confident he was probably able to culture H. influenzae,<\/em>\u201d which is notoriously difficult.<\/p>\n\n\n\n And some of the pathogens that Sawyer cultured and mounted in 1918\u201319 in Marseille were doozies: Bacillus anthracis <\/em>(which causes anthrax), Balantidium coli<\/em> (balantidiasis), Corynebacterium diphtheriae <\/em>(diphtheria), Mycobacterium tuberculosis <\/em>(tuberculosis), <\/em>and Neisseria meningitidis<\/em><\/a> (meningitis). But no H. influenzae<\/em> is to be found. Kennedy\u2019s theory is that \u201che probably brought them back but then didn’t keep them when it was found out that H. influenzae <\/em>was not the cause of influenza.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n What scientists and other scholars do, explains Kennedy, is filter out what\u2019s no longer thought to accurately explain our world. \u201cI don\u2019t tell my students, \u2018We\u2019re going to learn something today that’s no longer true.\u2019 We don’t teach phrenology,\u201d the idea that skull shape reflects personality. And in Sawyer\u2019s case, he may have quite literally \u201cfiltered out the slides that weren\u2019t important for his students.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/files\/2020\/11\/edit-200717_Sawyer_pathogen_slides_hjb_4864.jpg\")
\n\n\n\n![\"\n\n\n\n\t\n\n\t\n\n\t\t\n\n\t\t\n\n\t\t\n\n\t\n\n\t\n\n\t\t2020-04-29T21:19:13Z\n\n\t\t\n\n\t\t\n\n\t\t\n\n\t\t\t\n\n\t\t\t\t\n\n\t\t\t\n\n\t\t\t\n\n\t\t\t\n\n\t\t\t\n\n\t\t\t\n\n\t\t\n\n\t\n\n\t<SA:StructuredAnnotations\"](\"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/files\/2020\/11\/12-Gonococcus_20x.jpg\")
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