A Heroine of Humanity
This Young Englishwoman Risked Death in a Hideous Form to Save the Lives of Others
The serene courage of self-devotion to the service of humanity does not have the acclaim of the world very often. We have not learned how to measure the values of quiet heroism—the heroism that works in the solitude. We thrill to feats of daring, we are rather complacent to the bravery of scientific experiment, though the risk of life be great.
There is the story of a young Englishwoman, Miss Mary Davies, who, far behind the front with its stimulating excitement and without the inspiration of approving and emulous comrades, calmly, deliberately challenged death in one of its most horrible forms. She had seen the victims of one of the most terrible of war scourges—gaseous gangrene—suffering a loathsome death, and knew how hopelessly the surgeons in the laboratories of the American Ambulance where she served, worked to combat the plague. She realized that if inoculation with the bacilli of the disease could be successfully employed, thousands of wounded men would be saved, and she resolved to make the experiment.
She had seen many examples of the horrible results of this infection and had observed the invariably fatal course of the disease in animals inoculated with the bacilli. She watched and assisted in the experiments in which guinea-pigs were inoculated with gangrene bacilli. She had become convinced of the efficacy of injections with quinine hydrochlorid and had concluded that the experiments on small animals had given all the results of which they were capable and that the time had come for an experiment on a normal human body, and not one from the battlefield, fatigued and wounded and possibly infected by other bacilli.
Well aware that her plan would be prevented if it became known, she determined without a word to any one, to risk her life in an attempt to demonstrate the efficacy of the treatment, which she was convinced would cure the victims of this dread disease.
Her preparations deliberately and completely made, she waited until she was about to leave for a holiday, so that her absence would not disturb the work in the laboratory. She chose the deadliest strain of bacilli in the laboratory, obtained from the latest fatal case, of which two drops of culture sufficed to kill a guinea-pig. Then she inoculated herself in a manner most certain to produce the disease in animals, injecting fifty times the amount used to kill a guinea-pig, making one injection deep into the muscles of her thigh, the other just beneath the skin. Two hours later she quietly came to the laboratory and asked to be treated in the same manner as the animals under experiment.
The surgeons and attendants were greatly alarmed for her. Their experience had taught them the rapidity and horribleness of the effects of gangrene, the most dreaded and the most baffling of the diseases produced by the war. They began treatment of her at once, apprehensive and doubtful of results.
Injections with a quinine solution were made at the points where she had inoculated the deadly bacilli. She was sent to the nearest hospital for observation and further treatment. Quinine injections were given a second time. Symptoms of a slight degree of infection developed within twenty-four hours, but they subsided without operation becoming necessary, and it is more than gratifying to know that recovery was rapid and complete.
Miss Davies has been named a “heroine of science” and her brave and self-sacrificial deed will be properly recognized in medical science; but surely she has won a place in the world’s esteem and memory as a heroine of humanity.