The book begins with Jacob's mother, Marie, already infected with childbed or puerperal fever, having delivered 2 weeks early in the general ward, despite best intentions and lots of preparation for excellent care. Marie is convinced that the doctor who treats the general ward at Vienna Hospital, and also attends to the local autopsies, is carrying some poison on his hands as he goes between patients, not washing his hands. This is a preposterous line of thought in the mid-1800's, but as she is dying, she gathers her dear friends, also physicians, to share her thoughts and to make them promise to tell her newborn son, Jacob, of her life and work, when he is of age.
Jacob is sent to live at the Vienna Foundlings Home, where Marie was raised as well. Although he receives little education there, he is quite bright and takes it upon himself to care for the younger children when they are sick, already drawing his own conclusions about the transmission of illnesses and immunity of those previously exposed.
At the age of 12, a couple of Marie's friends, including Dr. Ignaz Semmelweis, the champion of handwashing among doctors at the time, reveal to Jacob his heritage and how Marie died, and also that he has a father who is a winemaker somewhere in France. Jacob then sets off to walk to Lille, France from Vienna, Austria, in the hopes of finding his father and discovering more of himself along the way.
His journey to France would not only reveal family he never knew, but also lead him to work with Louis Pasteur, the father of pasteurization, then later Joseph Lister, the pioneer of antiseptic use, in Scotland, and also Dr. Robert Koch in Germany, a founder of microbiology. His travels would take him not only all over Europe, but also to America for medical school at Johns Hopkins, where he would work with Dr. William Osler, a famed internal medicine doctor. While working in the labs of these iconic rock stars of the scientific and medical community of the time, Jacob studied anthrax, tuberculosis, yellow fever, cholera and malaria, to name a few, and much like Forrest Gump, he would find himself in the right place at the right time, over and over. Although unlike Gump, Jacob was a genius and wasn't merely a bystander, but often a catalyst.
In Search of the Animalcule is a very dense book, jam-packed with stories about the birth of different schools of thought in the field of medicine during the late 1800's. It contains many anecdotal stories that are factual, such as stories about Napoleon and the failing silkworm industry, and Queen Victoria and her abscess, in additional to all of the factual data about the rise of modern medicine. It's definitely not for everybody, and yes, it's far-fetched that one man, an uneducated orphan, at that, could be the catalyst for so many changes in the field of medicine. However, if you are into the history of modern medicine and science of that time, you will probably eat this book up. It's quite literally a who's who of the scientific and medical community of the late 1800's, and smack dab in the center is a guy who just wants to make things better for others. If this piques your interest in the least bit, check it out.
