her the precautions he’d learned from Dr. Leroy and the other scientists, around that time, while helping them in their search for infected animals: Sterilize everything with bleach, wash your hands, and don’t touch corpses. But now the bad days were past and, with Prosper’s arm around her, Estelle was a smiling, healthy young woman.
Prosper remembered the outbreak in his own way, mourning Estelle’s losses and some of a different sort. He showed us a treasured book, like a family bible—except it was a botanical field guide—on the endpapers of which he had written a list of names: Apollo, Cassandra, Afrodita, Ulises, Orfeo, and almost twenty others. They were gorillas, an entire group that he had known well, that he had tracked daily and observed lovingly at Lossi. Cassandra was his favorite, Prosper said. Apollo was the silverback. “Sont tous disparus en deux-mille trois,” he said. All of them, gone in the 2003 outbreak. In fact, though, they hadn’t entirely disparus: He and other trackers had followed the group’s final trail and found six gorilla carcasses along the way. He didn’t say which six. Cassandra, dead with others in a fly-blown pile? It was very hard, he said. He had lost his gorilla family, and also members of his human family.
For a long time Prosper stood holding the book, opened for us to see those names. He comprehended emotionally what the scientists who study zoonoses know from their careful observations, their models, their data. People and gorillas, horses and duikers and pigs, monkeys and chimps and bats and viruses: We’re all in this together.
III
EVERYTHING COMES
FROM SOMEWHERE
23
Ronald Ross came west from India, in 1874, at age seventeen, to study medicine at St. Bartholomew’s Hospital in London. He came to the study of malaria somewhat later.
Ross was a true son of the empire. His father, General Campbell Ross, a Scottish officer with roots in the Highlands, had served in the British Indian Army through the Sepoy Rebellion and fought in fierce battles against the hill tribes. Ronald had been “home” to England before, having endured a boarding school near Southampton. He fancied the idea of becoming a poet, or a painter, or maybe a mathematician; but he was the eldest of ten children, with all attendant pressures, and his father had decided he should enter the Indian Medical Service (IMS). After a lackluster five years at St. Bartholomew’s, Ross flunked the IMS qualifying exam, an inauspicious start for an eventual Nobel laureate in medicine. The two facts from his youth that do seem to have augured well and truly are that he won a schoolboy prize for mathematics and, during medical training, he diagnosed a woman as suffering from malaria. It was an unusual diagnosis, malaria being virtually unknown in England, even amid the Essex marshes where this woman lived. History doesn’t record whether Ross’s diagnosis was right because he scared her with talk of the deadly disease and she disappeared, presumably back into lowland Essex. Anyway, Ross tried the IMS exam again after a year, squeaked through, and was posted to duty in Madras. That’s where he started noticing mosquitoes. They annoyed him because they were so abundant in his bungalow.
Ross didn’t bloom early as a medical detective. He dabbled and dawdled for years, distracted with the enthusiasms of the polymath. He wrote poetry, plays, music, bad novels, and what he hoped were groundbreaking mathematical equations. His medical duties at the Madras hospital, which involved treating malarial soldiers with quinine, among other tasks, demanded only about two hours daily, which left him plenty of time for extracurricular noodling. But eventually the extracurriculars included wondering about malaria. What caused it—miasmal vapors, as the traditional view held, or some sort of infectious bug? If a bug, how was that bug transmitted? How could the disease be controlled?
After seven years of unexceptional service he returned to England on furlough, did a course in public health, learned to use a microscope, found a wife, and took her back to India. This time his post was a small hospital in Bangalore. He started looking through his microscope at blood smears from feverish soldiers. He lived an intellectually isolated life, far from scientific societies and fellow researchers, but in 1892 he learned belatedly that a French doctor and microscopist named Alphonse Laveran, working in Algeria and then Rome, had discovered tiny parasitic creatures (now known as protists) in the blood of malaria patients. Those parasites, Laveran argued, caused the disease. During another visit to London, with help