Titans of History (48 page)

Ultimately his power tottered as he aged and his patron Wilhelm died in 1888. Wilhelm was succeeded as kaiser by Crown Prince Frederick who was already tragically dying of cancer. After a short reign his place was taken on the throne by the young, impetuous and unbalanced Kaiser Wilhelm II, who in 1890 demanded the Chancellor's resignation. Bismarck was seventy-five but he was infuriated at his downfall. He had created Germany, and a new Europe but his successors—particularly Kaiser Wilhelm II—could not control his creation.

1820–1910

What a comfort it was to see her pass. She would speak to one, and nod and smile to as many more … we lay there by the hundreds, but we could kiss her shadow as it fell and lay our heads on the pillow again content
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An anonymous soldier in the Crimean War

The Lady of the Lamp overcame obstacles and obduracy to transform the state of medical care in the British army and to establish nursing as a trained and respectable profession for women: she improved the lives of millions.

Named after her Italian birthplace, Florence Nightingale was raised in England and educated at home by her father to a standard well above that considered advisable for women of her era. By the time the bright and bookish Nightingale reached her teens, she was well aware that marriage and a life in society—the usual prospects for a girl of her class—held little appeal for her.

When, at sixteen, she heard God's voice informing her that she had a mission, Nightingale set about escaping from the family fold into a life of her own. But it was several years before her parents allowed her to enter the socially disreputable profession of nursing. She became an expert on public health and hospitals until finally, at almost thirty, she persuaded her parents to let her go to Germany to one of the few institutions that provided training for nurses.

When the Crimean War broke out and newspapers began reporting graphically the terrible condition of the wounded British soldiers, Nightingale, by now the superintendent of the Institution for the Care of Sick Gentlewomen in London, was one of the first to respond. Sidney Herbert, an old friend and secretary of state for war, asked her to lead a party of nurses and to direct nursing in the British military hospitals in Turkey. In November 1854 Nightingale and her party arrived at the Barrack Hospital in Scutari, near Istanbul.

Battling against filthy conditions and a chronic shortage of supplies, faced with insubordinate nurses who were frequently drunk and intransigent doctors reluctant to acknowledge the authority of a woman, Nightingale transformed the military hospitals. She personally attended almost every patient, administering comfort and advice as she made her nightly rounds. The mortality rate of wounded soldiers when she arrived was 50 percent; by the time she left, it was just 2 percent.

Nightingale constantly set herself new and ever more ambitious goals. Within a year of taking up her first London post she
was longing to escape “this little molehill.” After nursing the sick in Turkey for a while, she set her sights on the greater goal of transforming the welfare of the British army as a whole. It was a task to which she dedicated the rest of her life. She pushed for the establishment of royal commissions on the matter and produced reports that were instrumental in the foundation of the Army Medical School. When she turned her attention to army health in India, she became so supreme an authority on the subject that successive viceroys sought her advice before taking up their posts.

“The very essence of Truth seemed to emanate from her,” wrote one contemporary, awed by “her perfect fearlessness in telling it.” Undaunted by resistance, Nightingale triumphed over the Scutari doctor who initially refused to allow nurses into the wards; the inspector-general of hospitals who tried to argue that her authority did not extend to the Crimea; the government officials who were tepid about her mission to improve the health and well-being of the British soldier.

The woman appointed general superintendent of female nursing in the military hospitals abroad transformed nursing into a respected profession. On her return to England she promoted training for midwives and for nurses in workhouses, and in 1860 she established the world's first school for nurses, at St. Thomas' Hospital in London.

Austere to the point of asceticism, Nightingale rejected her status as heroine, refusing official transport home from the Crimea and rebuffing all suggestions of public receptions. Back in England, she sequestered herself, rarely leaving her house. The invalidism of the world's most famous nurse is considered to have been largely psychosomatic. Nevertheless, attended by a constant stream of important visitors, Nightingale was able to devote herself tirelessly to an extensive network of causes.

Her single-mindedness bred a certain ruthlessness. Driven by a sense of divine mission, Nightingale was impatient with those whom she considered to lack the necessary zeal. When the dying Herbert had to curtail his involvement in some or other charitable cause, she cut him off. But it was this tenacity that enabled her to bring about such extraordinary changes in the nursing profession. In 1910 the ninety-year-old Nightingale, blind for a decade, died in London.

1822–1895

There are not two sciences: there is science and the application of science; these two are linked as the fruit is to the tree
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Louis Pasteur

The French microbiologist Louis Pasteur was a scientist whose varied and innovative studies made a massive contribution to the battle against disease in humans and animals. He did much pioneering work in the field of immunology, most importantly producing the first vaccine against rabies. His investigations into the micro-organisms that cause food to go bad were of vital importance to French and British industry, while the process of pasteurization he developed is still extremely important in preserving food and preventing illness.

Pasteur came from a family of tanners. As a child he was a keen artist, but it was clear to his teachers that he was academically very able. In 1843 he was admitted to the fine Parisian
training college the École Normale Supérieure. He became a master of science in 1845, and in 1847 he presented a thesis on crystallography which earned him a doctorate.

With such a prestigious academic background and some ground-breaking research into physical chemistry behind him, Pasteur gained a professorship in the science faculty at the University of Strasbourg. Here he met Marie Laurent, the daughter of the university rector; they were married in 1849 and had five children together, two of whom survived childhood.

After six years in Strasbourg, Pasteur moved on to Lille. He held the firm view that the theoretical and practical aspects of science should work hand in hand, so he began teaching evening classes to young working men in Lille and taking his regular students around nearby factories. He also began to study the process of fermentation; one of his early achievements, in 1857, was to show that yeast could reproduce in the absence of oxygen. This became known as the Pasteur effect.

By 1857 Pasteur was back at the École Normale Supérieure. Here he continued his research into fermentation and demonstrated with unusual experimental rigor that the process was driven by the activity of minute organisms. In 1867 the French emperor Napoleon III relieved Pasteur of his teaching duties and granted him a research laboratory. With a new freedom of study, Pasteur set about resolving, once and for all, the great scientific debate over spontaneous generation—the question of whether germs and micro-organisms could simply “appear” from nowhere. He found that germs were in fact transported in air and that food decomposed because it was exposed to them.

In 1862 Pasteur first tested the process, now known as pasteurization, by which milk and other liquids are heated to remove bacteria. In time this process would revolutionize the way food was prepared, stored and sold, and so save many people from
infection. Pasteur also applied his theoretical work to the French vinegar and wine industries and the British beer industry, allowing the businesses concerned to produce goods that did not perish so quickly. It was as a result of a suggestion from Pasteur that the British surgeon Joseph Lister began in the 1860s to adopt antiseptic methods during operations.

In 1865 Pasteur saved the French silk industry by helping to identify and eradicate a parasite that was killing silkworms. By 1881 he had developed techniques to protect sheep from anthrax and chickens from cholera. He observed that creating a weakened form of a germ and vaccinating animals with it gave them effective immunity. It was an important development of Jenner's earlier use of cowpox germs to vaccinate against smallpox.

The most important vaccination Pasteur produced was against rabies. By manipulating the dried nervous systems of rabid rabbits, he created a weakened form of the terrible disease and managed to inoculate dogs against it. He had treated only eleven dogs in 1885 when he took dramatic action to save the life of a nine-year-old boy who had been bitten by a rabid dog. It was extremely risky but totally successful. Pasteur remained a hero of the medical establishment until his death, after a series of strokes, in 1895. He was buried in Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris, then reinterred in a crypt at the Pasteur Institute.

Pasteur was one of many scientists who have performed medical miracles that have done so much to alleviate human suffering. Edward Jenner was one of the first, immunizing a child against smallpox in 1796. From the 1860s Joseph Lister (1827–1912) began his pioneering work on asepsis in surgery, using carbolic acid as an antiseptic to reduce the risk of infection. Operations had already been rendered far safer in the preceding decades by the physician John Snow (1813–58), who had introduced the use of anesthesia to enable pain-free operations. Snow was also responsible for
reducing the incidence of cholera by tracing its cause to contaminated water supplies.

In 1895 the German physicist Wilhelm Röntgen (1845–1923) discovered X-rays, thereby paving the way for vast improvements in the treatment of internal injuries. In 1928 Alexander Fleming (1881–1955) discovered penicillin, the first antibiotic, when he noticed that the mold in a dirty lab dish prevented bacteria from growing. In the 1950s the work of the French immunologist Jean Dausset (b. 1916) led to great advances in our understanding of how the body fights disease. In 1953, Francis Crick (1916–2004) and James Watson (b. 1928) discovered the double-helix shape of DNA. All those who worked on these projects deserve to be remembered as heroes of medicine.

1827–70 & 1835–1886

A monster without parallel
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George Thompson, an English engineer who was commissioned as an officer in the army of Francisco Solano López

Francisco Solano López was the vainglorious dictator of Paraguay who, in the name of honor and national prestige, led his country to almost total destruction at the hands of Brazil, Argentina and Uruguay. López was a deluded popinjay, an inept psychopath and a mass-murdering megalomaniac who was obsessed with dreams
of grandeur and believed that he could become the Napoleon of South America.

He was the eldest son of President Carlos Antonio López, a merciless tyrant who ruled Paraguay from 1844 until his death in 1862. The younger López had been groomed to succeed his father, and was promoted to brigadier general at just eighteen. He became an increasingly proud and preposterous young man, and liked to have himself pictured on horseback or in military uniform, with a profusion of ribbons and insignia, his thick black beard covering a somewhat portly face. From his teenage years he was an avid womanizer, capable of oleaginous charm and eloquence, but likely to become forceful if his advances were rejected.

In 1853 young López traveled to France on a diplomatic mission on behalf of his father. In Paris he became intoxicated with the political pomp, imperial ceremony and military showmanship of Emperor Napoleon III. He studied the campaigns of the first Napoleon and believed that he himself had a talent for strategy. While in Paris he also met Eliza Lynch, a beautiful Irish girl whom he took back to Paraguay and who was to become his mistress for the rest of his life.

To this day Paraguayans are divided over the figure of Eliza Lynch. Those who see Francisco López's presidency as a noble episode in Paraguayan history have placed his Irish moll on a pedestal as Paraguay's version of Evita Perón—a captivating visionary and a regenerator of the country. On the other hand, for the many who regard López's presidency as a disaster, brought about by sadism and hubris, Lynch was a gorgeous, profane, blood-spattered seductress, the Latin-Celtic Jezebel who stoked her lover's ego, encouraging him to embark on his disastrous military adventures, who turned him against his own family and encouraged him to kill.

Eliza Alicia Lynch was born on June 30, 1835 in County Cork in Ireland, to a Protestant physician, John Lynch, and his wife,
Adelaide Schnock. In 1847 the family moved to Paris, and in 1850, when she was just fifteen, Eliza married a French military surgeon.

The marriage ended in divorce, and Eliza was already working as a courtesan when she was introduced to López in 1853. To the thickset, chubby-faced López she must have seemed an exotic beauty, with her tall, voluptuous figure, her long red hair, her blue eyes and her porcelain skin. Their love affair developed quickly and by the time that López had to return to Paraguay, Lynch was pregnant. Besotted, López left her funds to follow him to South America. She gave birth to the first of five sons in October 1855, not long after she arrived in Buenos Aires.

Soon settled in Asunción in palatial splendor, Eliza simultaneously delighted and horrified Paraguayan high society with her charm, Parisian affectations and impish behavior—not to mention her importation of French cuisine, music, perfume, fashions and art.

On his father's death in 1862, López inherited his power, imprisoned potential rivals and was duly elected president by the Paraguayan congress. While on his deathbed, his father was reported to have warned him of the dangers of foreign aggression. But despite growing up so close to the center of Paraguayan politics, López showed little sensitivity to the precarious nature of the balance of power in the region, determined to become the Napoleon III of South America. Foolishly, in 1863, just one year into his reign, he allowed Paraguay to become embroiled in the civil war that was taking place in nearby Uruguay, in which both Brazil and Argentina—the most powerful nations in South America—had a stake.