Medicine: Plagued

The sudden and unexpected death of a senior scientist at Britain’s top-secret germ-warfare laboratory cried out for explanation. The first War Office announcement only stimulated curiosity. It was possible, said a cautious official spokesman, that Geoffrey Bacon, 44, had been killed by “an accidental infection resulting from his work.” A post mortem examination two days later revealed the full horror of what had happened. Researcher Bacon had been a victim of pneumonic plague, a form of the fiercely contagious Black Death that ravaged Europe in the Middle Ages, slaughtering millions and depopulating whole cities.

The government promptly alerted health officers in southern England to a possible outbreak of the dread disease. Bacon’s widow and two daughters, and a dozen friends from the Microbiological Laboratory near Salisbury where he worked, were all under rigid medical surveillance, and all were getting dosed with antibiotics. So were 30 members of the staff at Odstock Hospital, where Bacon died. It was left to a War Office board of inquiry to try to determine just how a man with ten years’ laboratory experience had contracted his fatal infection.