Had he lived to be a hundred and twenty, Waldemar Haffkine would have died this year. He was born in 1860, into the generation of men who found the means to prevent or cure rabies, typhoid, malaria, yellow fever, and syphilis. Taken together, those diseases may or may not have killed as many people as the two for which Haffkine found the preventive vaccines: cholera and the bubonic plague. During his lifetime, Queen Victoria made him a Companion of the Indian Empire, Lord Joseph Lister saluted him as a “Savior of Humanity,” and the Chief Rabbi of England, Joseph Hertz, used excerpts from his writings in the Additional Notes he made to the Second Edition of the Soncino Chumash, describing him as a “a famous scientist.” The vast majority of educated Americans alive today have never heard his name.

Haffkine was born Vladimir Aronovich Mordecai Wolf Chavkin in Odessa on March 3, 1860, to a Jewish family of limited means. He received his earliest education at home from his maternal grandfather, who taught at a Jewish school in Odessa, and at the age of twelve proceeded to the gymnasium in nearby Berdiansk. He performed outstandingly there, and in 1879 was admitted to the University of Odessa.

Haffkine’s undergraduate career was a melange of intellectual endeavor and revolutionary activity. At the gymnasium he had been powerfully attracted by the underground literature of the socialist-revolutionary movement, then in its heyday, and he now found his natural home among the radical students who were struggling against the Czarist government’s ever-increasing restrictions on academic freedom. During his years at the university he was arrested three times, suspended once, and finally expelled when he signed a petition protesting the forced resignation of his teacher and mentor, Elie Metchnikoff. Nevertheless, he was permitted, after a protracted bureaucratic wrangle, to collect his degree of Doctor of Science in 1884.

The next few years were frustrating. Unable to get a university position because of his refusal to convert to the Russian Orthodox Church, Haffkine had to settle for a desk job at the Odessa Museum of Natural History. It offered little in the way of intellectual stimulation, and in 1888 he left to work with Moritz Schiff in Geneva. Then in 1889 Metchnikoff, who had left Russia to work at the Pasteur Institute, wrote to ask if Haffkine would like to join him there. Haffkine jumped at the chance, and in 1891 began his research on an anti-cholera vaccine. His quest took a little over a year, climaxing with an auto-inoculation in June of 1892 that was the vaccine’s first use on a human subject. The last and worst of the five great cholera pandemics of the 19th century was then ravaging Asia and Europe, and early in 1893 Haffkine got the permission of the British to go to India and combat the disease at its source, the joint deltas of the Ganges and Brahmaputra Rivers.

He said later that in his darkest expectations he had had no idea of the difficulties he would have to face. He had gone to Bengal to subject his vaccine to a controlled experiment in the form of field trials held amid epidemic conditions. But the British ruled that all participation in these trials must be voluntary, so that any such thing as the selection of a proper mix of subjects and controls was out of his hands. Moreover, Haffkine soon discovered he had no real idea of the geographical unpredictability of cholera. He had originally planned to select some historically vulnerable village, inoculate half the population, and wait for the next epidemic to wash over it. This proved to be based on a fantasy: in any given village the next epidemic might not come for years. The year in which Haffkine arrived in India was, as a matter of fact, one of the freest of cholera in the memory of anyone then living. His first expedition, a ten-month trip along the axis of the hills that lead northwest to the Punjab, encountered no epidemic cholera at all, although he managed to inoculate upward of 20,000 people. The one difficulty he had not had was in finding volunteers.

Haffkine’s first opportunity to operate in something other than a scientific vacuum came in March 1894, when cholera broke out in Calcutta around two infected water tanks. His first trial involved a population of 200, of whom 116 were inoculated; all 116 escaped infection while there were 9 cases, several fatal, among the 84 controls. His vaccine continued to acquit itself well, though not always so dramatically, throughout the epidemic which peaked over Calcutta during the next two years. Haffkine’s vaccine did not guarantee absolute immunity against cholera as do, say, Salk’s polio vaccine or the vaccination against smallpox. But it did provide a sensible margin of protection for the inoculated, among whom morbidity and mortality proved to be approximately one-tenth of what they were in the unprotected population.

Haffkine worked throughout the northeastern quadrant of India for the next two years, eventually establishing a number of inoculation centers. Still, there were setbacks. In one mill town, Serampore, the advent of Haffkine and his assistants caused an outbreak of mass panic in which educated natives and Europeans inexplicably joined, forcing the inoculation team to flee for their lives. English anti-vaccinationists occasionally wrote letters to newspapers announcing that the Indian government was injecting into the veins of its fighting men “the excreta of men of no caste”; these letters sent tremors of alarm through a military command which remembered the lessons of the Sepoy Mutiny. And Haffkine found it almost impossible to establish operations in one area where he should logically have been welcomed with open arms: the tea gardens of Assam, traditionally one of the worst breeding-grounds of the disease. The anti-cholera vaccination caused a reaction which made physical labor impossible for a day or two; the growers were reluctant to lose a day’s work and the coolies equally so to lose a day’s pay.

Then there was the question of money. The original arrangement that Haffkine had made with the British was that they would allow him to go to India since he seemed to want to. No mention was made of paying him for what he would be doing there. After he had been working for a few months, one official remarked that an allowance to help him meet his living expenses (it was never called a salary) might be appropriate, and he was voted one of fifteen rupees a day. This allowance expired on December 31, 1893, and was not renewed—the idea simply seems not to have occurred to anyone. In June 1894, Haffkine finally submitted a request for money to meet his expenses, which he had been paying out of his own pocket for six months, and, in September, the finance department of the government of India sent him a fascinating reply. The department informed Haffkine that it had decided to “continue” his allowance for “twelve months, from January 1, 1894, to December 31, 1894.” The fact that most of 1894 was in fact already over was not alluded to. This curious pattern was to be repeated the following year, after which the authorities simply dropped the matter—that is, they stopped paying Haffkine anything at all.

For whatever reasons, Haffkine never taxed the authorities about this; he was more concerned that they would allow his work to go to waste by failing to erect the institutional apparatus necessary to perpetuate it. To this end, he constantly besought them to set up laboratories, inoculation centers, training programs for operators; he also urged them to publish the statistics from his work and give their official imprimatur to vaccination programs for civil servants. And eventually, though never without a certain amount of poking and prodding, the authorities agreed to much of this. Haffkine’s mission was not an easy one; he had to track a capricious disease through a country of strangers in one of the most punishing climates on earth; he had to train and keep a staff which, unlike him, was not at all agreeable to the idea of working for nothing. Even so, he did not feel himself to be the object of a systematic program of frustration of the kind that would be put into effect during the second part of his Indian campaign. This began in the autumn of 1896, when Haffkine was sent to Bombay upon the outbreak of bubonic plague.

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Haffkine arrived in Bombay on October 7 and began to work on an anti-plague vaccine the following day. He succeeded in developing one by January 1897, once again testing it on himself before allowing its use on any other human being, as he had done with his cholera vaccine. An opportunity for a field trial under perfectly controlled conditions occurred almost at once when plague broke out at the Byculla Men’s House of Correction. As in Calcutta, the first results were dramatic: the 183 uninoculated prisoners had 12 cases of plague with 6 deaths, while there were only 2 cases, both ending in recovery, among the 154 inoculated. By the end of the year, almost 8,000 citizens of Bombay had volunteered for inoculation, and Haffkine had begun the expeditions to nearby plague-striken areas—Lanowlie, Poona, Damaun—that along with the running of his laboratory were to occupy him for the next six years.

Now it would be quite untrue to say that the British in Bombay did not take Haffkine’s work seriously. They welcomed him; they gave him space for a laboratory; they supplied him with men and materials (within certain limits, as will be seen); they even paid him a salary (and called it that). The problems that eventually developed probably originated in the way the British regarded their priorities in dealing with the plague. It must be remembered that the science of immunology was still in its infancy in 1896. The idea on which it was based—the germ theory of disease—was only twenty years old when Haffkine sailed for India. The field trials he performed in Calcutta and Assam were among the first examples in human history of the use of mass inoculations to halt the progress of an epidemic. Haffkine was, in short, a new thing in the world. In northeastern India, where cholera had been endemic for generations, a condition against which no remedy had ever been thought of, the authorities were amenable to the idea of having someone come in and perform experiments within certain limits. But the plague that sailed into Bombay out of the blue in August 1896 was not a condition to be lived with but rather a crisis to be met, and it engendered what might be called a crisis mentality in the authorities who bore the responsibility for dealing with it.

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The British medical authorities in Bombay, who had had no training in the fledgling science of bacteriology, relied exclusively on the then universally accepted sanitarian approach to the epidemic. They limewashed the insides and outsides of houses where plague had struck, disinfecting or destroying household effects they believed might prove sources of further infections, and they ordered all plague victims into hospitals and their families into “contact camps,” set up for the purpose of isolating possible carriers.

The British were willing to accept Haffkine’s enterprise as one prong in this campaign, but they treated him like a stepchild. Haffkine soon found that in addition to his field work he bore sole responsibility for keeping the government reminded that in order to continue producing vaccine his laboratory had to be kept supplied with equipment and manpower. The interoffice records of the Indian Military Medical Service from 1896 to 1902 show a continual stream of requests from Haffkine’s office, sometimes frantic, for technical and administrative facilities. These were met with an attitude ranging from simple absentmindedness to what could only have been deliberate obstructionism. He needed men, always more men; none could be spared. He needed someone to conduct follow-up investigations of his results; it took months. He asked that in order to verify his results on a mass scale, a question on inoculations be added to the census form; the idea was rejected as useless. Overwhelmed by the press of work, he asked that a bookkeeper be added to his staff; an official commented: “It is difficult to see why a gentleman of Mr. Haffkine’s acumen and nationality should be unable to supervise accounts of a somewhat petty nature.”

And he suggested that, since his preparation had been shown to reduce plague mortality by as much as 80 or 90 per cent, those persons who volunteered for the vaccine should be excused from the otherwise compulsory measures of segregation into hospitals and contact camps. The British rejected the idea out of hand at first, bitterly resenting Haffkine’s intrusion into the field of public-health administration, which they considered their own preserve. Eventually, however, they did accept his proposal as de facto policy. They were well aware that the natives of India were absolutely terrified of the European hospitals—much more so, in fact, than they were of the plague. Hindus feared contact with co-religionists of other castes, Muslims feared being forced to eat forbidden meats, and not a few of both religions believed that the hospitals had been established for the purpose of supplying Queen Victoria with human livers. Haffkine was appalled by the distress and upheaval caused in the natives’ lives by the policies of segregation and disinfection, and by the money and energy the British continued to pour into them even when it had become apparent that they had little or no effect on controlling the spread of plague. Several times he tried to point out that since the plague bacillus, unlike the cholera microbe, could not survive outside the body of a host, attempts to annihilate it on floors and walls were in fact wide of the mark. (At the time, neither Haffkine nor the British knew the actual mode of transmission of the plague, which is through the agency of a vector flea that carries the microbe back and forth among the animals and humans it bites. They did know that rats were the first carriers of the disease in any epidemic, but the authorities had accepted early on that any attempt to control the rodent population of Bombay and environs was hopeless.)

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The conclusion seems inescapable that the Indian Military Medical Service felt less and less hospitable to Haffkine as time went on. Neither as doctors nor as military officers were the British inclined to welcome the suggestions of an outsider who represented such a challenge to the established way of doing things—and Haffkine, the Russian Jew, was no ordinary outsider. In August 1899, they took their, first overt step toward edging him out of the way. Haffkine’s laboratory, which had been moved from site to site as the demands on its productivity grew ever greater, was in that month installed in what was finally to be its permanent home—the Government House at Parel, henceforward known as the Plague Research Laboratory. The ceremony marking its opening was a gala affair, attended by the governor of Bombay and any number of military and medical notables. Only Haffkine was missing—he was in England on furlough. The festivities had been planned so as to occur during his absence. His place on the ceremonial roster was taken by William Burney Bannerman, his second-in-command and a surgeon-general in the Indian military service.

Haffkine returned to India to find other things incubating in his laboratory besides Pestis yersinis. As he wrote to the secretary of the government of India in 1900:

In a scientific establishment, the director is likely to be also the most knowledgeable teacher at the time; and a sincere and unreserved readiness on his part to teach must be secured. This object is frustrated if the teacher is held under the prospect of being superseded or circumvented by those whom he teaches. Want of security on this point will render the best man irate and distrustful. . . . Government and the public are right in reckoning upon the head of a laboratory exhibiting a readiness for self-abnegation and upon his wishes and aims being far above his own interests. . . . But . . . to enable a servant to really forget his interests, it is unavoidable that the government and the public shall think of those themselves. . . . The disposition of a man to teach is maintained by his being surrounded with pupils grateful, not with watchful rivals, looking for the first opportunity of ousting him from his office.

Then, on October 30, 1902, during a mass outdoor inoculation in the Punjabi village of Malkowal, an Indian assistant dropped a forceps he was using to remove the stoppers from the vaccine bottles. Instead of following Haffkine’s instructions for such an eventuality and sterilizing it in the flame of a spirit lamp, he swished it briefly in carbolic acid, according to the less stringent dictates of the Punjab Plague Manual, and then opened the bottle with it. Nineteen people inoculated from that bottle subsequently died of tetanus, and the heavens were brought down on Haffkine’s head. A commission set up to investigate the tragedy declared that the bottle had been contaminated in the Plague Research Laboratory, and in 1904 Haffkine was relieved of the title and salary of director-in-chief.

He had been railroaded, of course. Nothing untoward happened to any of the people inoculated from any other of the hundreds of bottles prepared in the same batch for use that day, and the physician performing the inoculations later deposed that the contents of the bottle in question were absolutely odorless when he opened it. (Sniffing each bottle as it was opened was standard operating procedure in the field, precisely because of the danger of such an occurrence. A bottle that had been incubating a tetanus culture since it left Bombay would have stunk to high heaven by the time it reached the Punjab.)

Haffkine spent the next few years in Europe, taking his case to the scientific community. The matter became something of a cause cèlàbre, climaxing on July 29, 1907, when a letter signed by ten internationally renowned microbiologists, including Nobel Laureate Sir Ronald Ross, appeared in the London Times, stating that the accusation against Haffkine was “not only not proven but distinctly disproven.” With this imprimatur Haffkine was finally allowed to return to his work in India, though with shaming curtailments to his salary and prestige. He never got over his bitterness at this betrayal, which he very likely saw as the climax to years of professional frustration and petty humiliations. Nevertheless he resumed his duties, serving until 1915, when he reached the mandatory age of fifty-five for pensionable retirement.

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Haffkine devoted most of the remaining fifteen years of his life to the furtherance of Jewish causes. This concern, which he only now had the leisure to implement fully, had in fact been a constant throughout his life. During his years at the University of Odessa he had been known as one of the tiny minority of Jewish students who were openly proud of their identity rather than regarding it as something to be concealed before entrance into the world of high culture could be attempted. This open acknowledgment of his Jewish identity, rare enough among the non-political students of the time, must have been almost unheard of in the radical circles where Haffkine found his closest friends. He was, after all, a member of the Narodnaya Volya—and one of the two student founders of the Jewish self-defense movement that arose to meet the Odessa pogrom of 1881. Later, at the Pasteur Institute, when he was working twelve and fourteen hours a day on his anti-cholera vaccine, he also played a leading role in organizational efforts to raise money for Jews attempting to flee Russia. In 1895 he wrote to an English publisher who had requested biographical material: “It would give me great pleasure if, instead of making people believe that I am a Russian or a Pole, you would say that I am a Jew, an Israelite, or Hebrew, whichever you prefer.”

Now, in 1915, Haffkine began his retirement with a journey eastward across the United States, during which he sought (among other things) to find out as much as possible about the conditions of American Jewish life. He visited the major cities and the Jewish agricultural communities in California and New Jersey; he met Horace Kallen and Felix Frankfurter. He ate in kosher restaurants, shopped in Jewish department stores, and struck up conversations with peddlers in Jewish neighborhoods. In New York, a performance of Tolstoy’s Resurrection at Kessler’s Roof Garden on Second Avenue moved him to tears.

It was during this trip that Haffkine wrote an article for the Menorah Journal entitled “A Plea for Orthodoxy.” Haffkine was a fervent believer in God; elsewhere he had said that monotheism was the only philosophical framework in which scientific investigation was possible, since it was the only one that posited a completely transcendent God and therefore left nature intelligible on its own terms. Polytheism he identified with animism, and claimed that it rendered natural phenomena essentially unknowable. Nevertheless, his grounds for urging the forms of Orthodox practice were not that they were divinely commanded but rather that they alone were capable of preserving the Jews as a recognizable and self-conscious people in the world. Haffkine was what might be called a nationalist of the Diaspora. His ultimate vision was one of Jewish communities scattered among the nations of the world, each cohering through its continuing celebration of the Law and all acknowledging the common bond of their religious inheritance. The dangers of persecution were secondary in his mind to those of assimilation and indifferent ignorance. And, although he contributed to the purchase of Jewish land in Palestine as readily as he did to any Jewish cause, a return to Zion on a political basis played no part in his thinking at all. For one thing, it was irrelevant to his concept of Jewish survival; he pointed out on a number of occasions that the Jews had been forced to give up their homeland once, but had taken their religion with them; this had preserved them as a people while their despoilers had gone down to oblivion. For another, he was dubious about the political feasibility of establishing a Jewish state in Palestine. Once the British got their Mandate there, he was extremely skeptical as to whether they could ever be persuaded to give it up.

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It was to the survival of Jewish culture in the world at large, then, that Haffkine turned his thoughts. In 1919 he drafted a petition for the civil and religious rights of the Jews of Eastern Europe which was presented at the Versailles Conference by a group of notables. In Paris, where he eventually settled, he served on the boards of trustees of both YIVO and the Alliance Israelite. And in 1929 he created the Haffkine Foundation out of his life savings for the funding of the yeshivahs of Eastern Europe, stipulating that their curricula be expanded to include science and trades “so that [their students] not be reduced to misery and begging.”

Haffkine died in Switzerland the following year, 1930, mercifully spared the sight of his beneficiaries’ ultimate fate. His name, the inexplicable victim of some historiographic memory-hole at least as far as the West is concerned, is borne today by the Haffkine Institute in Bombay (as his laboratory was renamed in 1925); by a Memorial Grove in the Kennedy Forest in Jerusalem; by a laboratory flask he designed for the growth of plague cultures; and by a strain of white mice he bred for experimental work. His posterity lies with those whose parents would not have been born to conceive them but for him; their number is as the sands of the sea.