"Funny Noguchi"

A vivid biography of the late great Hideyo Noguchi who died while seeking the cause of yellow fever in Africa, appeared last week.* It uncloaks the tumultuous little scientist, of whom only intimate friends knew more than that he was born in 1876 to a Japanese peasant, that he eventually reached the U. S. where he produced important discoveries on snake venoms, syphilis, infantile paralysis, rabies, smallpox, yellow fever, that nations gave him kudos.

The Rockefeller Institute, of which he was a member, affects a scientific attitude by shrouding its researchers in their cold reports. For example, scarcely a soul knew that Noguchi was married--to a Manhattan girl named Mary Dardis, whom he called Mazie. She called him Hidey, as he insisted. They lived in a confused menage near Central Park. He would come in at all hours, would sleep but three or four hours (when he was a child he reasoned that brief sleep was the essence of Napoleon's career). Nor did many know why the fingers of his left hand were stubby. When he was three, he rolled into a floor brazier of live coals. Before his mother could get to him his hand was a jelly. Later a country surgeon cleaned up the finger stumps, made the butts useful enough to hold test tubes and beer bottles.

The accident made his scientific career. For the subsequent operation turned his busy, acquisitive, ambitious brain to medicine, then to bacteriology. He learned very easily. So he lazied with geishas, saki, talk and chess. He borrowed money, for his schooling and travels, with amazing ingenuity. He always meant to repay loans, but rarely did with more than gratitude : "I hope the master [who financed most of his vagaries, including steerage passage to San Francisco] will take care of his honorable wife [who sold her precious marriage kimono for his maintenance]. . . . Please remember me to all who have eaten out of the same kettle. With bent neck. . . ."

In Philadelphia Dr. Simon Flexner got him a laboratory job at the University. The late Dr. Silas Weir Mitchell gave him patronage. He worked hard, brilliantly, but episodically, and got results. He pushed himself into this work and that, pushed himself to Germany and European elsewheres, gloated in honors: "In Copenhagen they gave me the Royal Medal. If I add what I got from Spain, I have two foreign decorations. It is said that the Swedish Crown intends to decorate me. . . . I was given audience by two royalties. . . ." He often referred to himself with naive objectiveness, as "funny Noguchi."

Intense, irregular work and living gave him an enlarged heart and diabetes. He was gloomy when he went to Africa in 1927. Mrs. Noguchi remained behind, gloomy too. She still lives in Manhattan.

The Author obviously considers the tumultuous scientific life ideal. Of himself he reports: "Born, practiced dentistry, taught physiology, learned not much, read two or three men, learned a little, came to know two or three women, learned a good deal, made friends with two rats, learned prodigiously, wrote about the rats, continued to write." Actually Dr. Gustav Eckstein, 40, has been a dental surgeon for 20 years, a medical doctor for seven, is salaried instructor of physiology at the University of Cincinnati. He lives across the Ohio River, at Fort Thomas, Ky. For most of his source material he went to Noguchi's old Japanese haunts.

*NOGUCHI--Gustav Eckstein Harpers ($5).

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