Haffkine, Waldemar Mordecai Wolfe

(b. Odessa, Russia, 15 March 1860; d. Lausanne, Switzerland, 25 October 1930)

bacteriology.

Haffkine was the third of six children of Rosalie Landsberg and Aaron Khavkin (the Russian form of the name). The family was Jewish and of modest circumstances. Haffkine’s mother died just before his seventh birthday and his father was frequently absent on business; his childhood was therefore lonely. He himself never married.

Haffkine attended the Gymnasium in Berdyansk, where he became interested in books, science, and physical fitness and received the highest grades. He attended the University of Odessa, supporting his studies with small sums he earned as a tutor and graduating doctor of science in 1884. Élie Metchnikoff was one of his teachers and influenced Haffkine toward devoting his life to science.

Haffkine was then offered a teaching position at the university on the condition that he convert to the Russian Orthodox Church, which he refused to do. Instead he accepted an appointment as assistant in the Odessa Museum of Zoology, which he held until 1888. While there he wrote two articles that were published in the Annales des sciences naturelles of Paris and became a member of the Society of Naturalists of Odessa. He left Odessa to teach physiology for a year under Moritz Schiff at the University of Geneva. In 1889 Metchnikoff, who was working at the Pasteur Institute, offered him the only position vacant there—that of librarian. Haffkine accepted eagerly and in 1890 became assistant to the director of the institute, Émile Roux. This event changed the entire course of Haffkine’s life and brought him into the mainstream of research in preventive medicine.

The prevention of cholera had already occupied Metchnikoff and Robert Koch, and Haffkine took up cholera research during the 1888 epidemic. He conducted animal tests with a heat-killed culture of a highly virulent strain that he had created. By early July 1892 he was able to report success to the Biological Society of Paris; he then injected himself with a dose of four times the strength that was later used, recorded his reactions, and determined that his vaccine was safe for human use. His success brought him congratulations from Koch, Roux, and Pasteur.

Haffkine then sought to test the vaccine under epidemic conditions and decided to go to Siam. When Lord Dufferin, ambassador to France and formerly viceroy of India, learned of his project he persuaded Haffkine to go instead to India, where cholera was raging. Haffkine arrived in Calcutta in March 1893 and immediately set to work among a people totally strange to him and much divided among themselves. As cholera struck one village after another, Haffkine followed in its wake with two doctors, a few laboratory assistants, and two horse-drawn carriages with inoculation equipment. For two years, working without pay and in the face of hostility from the villagers, he inoculated volunteers. On one occasion stones thrown by the crowd broke glass instruments and a panic nearly ensued; Haffkine quickly pulled up his shirt and allowed another doctor to plunge a hypodermic into his side. The curiosity of the villagers was thus aroused and 116 of the 200 peasants assembled volunteered for inoculation (none were to die in the epidemic, although nine of those who refused inoculation did). Haffkine kept careful records of his subjects, including their sex, physique, age, race, religion, and caste. Within the two years 45,000 persons were inoculated, most of them twice, and the death rate from cholera was reduced by 70 percent. Haffkine was still unable, however, to evaluate the degree of immunity conferred or how long it lasted.

In 1895 Haffkine contracted malaria and left India for England to try to recover his health. He returned to Calcutta in March 1896; six months later he was reassigned to Bombay, where plague was epidemic—despite denials by the newspapers, the death toll was rising and many were fleeing the city. He improvised a laboratory in a corridor of Grant Medical College and, with a staff of one clerk and three servants, began experiments with his antiplague vaccine on laboratory animals.

By December, Haffkine was convinced of the efficacy of the vaccine on animals; on 10 January 1897 a doctor agreed to inoculate him in secret and the principal of the college agreed to be a witness. Once again the dosage was four times that which was later used. Haffkine developed high fever and pain at the site of the injection; nevertheless, he attended a meeting of the Indian Medical Service, no one present being aware of the injection he had undergone. The next morning, when he described his symptoms—admitting the pain—to the staff, faculty, and students of the college and asked for volunteers, hundreds responded.

Haffkine’s proposals for the training of medical officers from epidemic areas in the preparation and administration of the vaccine were rejected by the Indian government. He further urged a program of public education and the inoculation of soldiers, prisoners, and coolies; again the government refused. Hearing of the high death rate from cholera and plague in Russia, he then offered his vaccine and his services in training doctors in his techniques free to the czarist government, and was again turned down. Nevertheless, scientists from many countries (including Russia) came to the Plague Research Laboratory in Bombay that Haffkine had founded and of which he was director in chief. There he taught them his methods of vaccine preparation and inoculation procedures. Requests for enormous quantities of vaccine arrived from all over the world. The laboratory, after much stress and agitation, was moved to the Old Government House, where it still functions. Haffkine himself was invited to lecture before the Royal Society of London and professional groups, and received many other honors. In 1897 Queen Victoria named him Companion of the Order of the Indian Empire, and in 1899 he applied for and was granted British citizenship.

In 1902 plague was epidemic in the Punjab and an all-out inoculation campaign was planned. Haffkine requested from England a dozen doctors and nurses and thirty soldiers—to be trained in his laboratory—to aid in this effort, but received only a handful. In the middle of this, at the end of October, nineteen people, of the tens of thousands inoculated, contracted tetanus and died. All had been inoculated from the same bottle of vaccine (brew No. 53N); no unusual results were traced to the five other bottles used the same day. The British medical officials publicly accused Haffkine and his laboratory of having sent contaminated vaccine to the Punjab, and Haffkine was suspended without pay before proper investigations were even begun. A Commission of Inquiry was appointed, headed by Sir Lawrence Jenkins, chief justice of Bombay. None of its members were bacteriologists. The commission lasted almost five years, including the preparation of its report. Haffkine was called before it several times, then returned to England in 1904. The report was withheld until 1907, when public and other pressures—most notably a letter to the Times (London), initiated by Sir Ronald Ross and signed by ten prominent bacteriologists, listing arguments why the charge against Haffkine must be disproved—forced its release. The letter concluded that “there is very strong evidence to show that the contamination took place when the bottle was opened at Mulkowal [the village where the deaths occurred], owing to the abolition by the Plague authorities of the technique prescribed by the Bombay laboratory and to the consequent failure to sterilize the forceps which were used in opening the bottle, and which during the process were dropped to the ground.”

During this time medical journals and papers in India took positions on both sides, but Haffkine received tangible honors from other parts of the world. Haffkine was exonerated, and began negotiations that took him back to the work in India that he realized was unfinished. He was broken in morale but chose to return despite reduced status and at his original pay, contrary to the promises of local princes.

He was again in Calcutta in December 1907, in the laboratory of the Presidency General Hospital. He met with coolness from the British medical officers, as he had throughout his career, but received cooperation from the Indians. The Institut de France awarded him the Prix Briant, its highest honor, in 1909, and the Tata Institute of Science in Bangalore elected him to its Court of Visitors. In 1915 he reached compulsory retirement age and left India to spend some time in London and then Paris. For the rest of his life he occupied himself with Jewish affairs; in 1929 he created the Haffkine Foundation, which still exists, for fostering religious, scientific, and vocational education in Eastern European yeshivas—he bequeathed the Foundation his personal fortune of $500,000. In 1925 the Plague Research Institute that he founded in Bombay was renamed in his honor and still bears that name.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

I. Original Works. Some of Haffkine’s articles published in professional journals are “Recherches biologiques sur l’Astasia Ocellata, n.s.,” in Annales des sciences naturelles (1885); “Recherches biologiques sur l’Euglena viridus, Ehr.,” ibid. (1886); “Vaccination Against Asiatic Cholera,” a lecture given at Calcutta Medical College, 24 March 1893, in Indian Medical Gazette, vol. 28 (1893); “A Lecture on Vaccination Against Cholera,” in British Medical Journal (21 Dec. 1895); “An Inoculation of Coolies,” in Indian Medical Gazette, vol. 31 , no. 7 (1896); and “The Inoculation Accident in Manila in 1906: Contamination of Cholera Vaccine With Plague Virus,” in Journal of the American Medical Association, vol. 52 (1909).

Separate publications include Health of the Population After Plague Inoculation, lecture given at Poona, 29 June 1901 (Bombay, 1901); and On Prophylactic Inoculation Against Plague and Pneumonia (Calcutta, 1914).

Some of Haffkine’s articles written for popular journals include “Les nouvelles écoles techniques en Russie,” in Journal of the Norwegian Ministry of Public Instruction (1889); “On the Primary Schools in Scandinavia,” in Russian, in Popular School (1889); “Preventive Inoculation,” in Popular Science Monthly (June-July, 1900); and “A Plea for Orthodoxy,” in Menorah Journal, 2 , no. 2 (1916), 67–77.

Haffkine’s official reports were submitted periodically to the government of India and dealt with his own research and the work of the Plague Research Laboratory. These reports are deposited in the National Archives of India, New Delhi and the Secretariat Record Office of the State of Maharashtra in the Elphinstone College Building, Bombay. Those written for the Bengal Government before 1900 are at Bhawani Dutta Lane, Calcutta, and those after 1900 are in Writers’ Building, Dalhousie Square, Calcutta.

II. Secondary Literature. A discussion of Haffkine’s discourse on preventive inoculation, delivered at the Royal Society, London, 8 June 1899, chaired by Lord Lister, president, is in British Medical Journal (1 July 1899).

On Haffkine and his work see also Edythe Lutzker, “Waldemar M. Haffkine, His Contributions to Global Public Health,” in Actes du XI ^e Congrès International d’Histoire des Sciences (Warsaw-Cracow, 1965), pp. 214–219, trans. into Italian by S. U. Nahon in La rassegna mensile di Israel (Rome-Milan, 1966), pp. 532–533; “Report on the Biography of Waldemar Haffkine (1860–1930); Life and Contributions to Global Public Health,” in Yearbook of the American Philosophical Society (1967), pp. 577–580; “Some Missing Pages from the Histories of Nineteenth Century Medicine: Waldemar Mordecai Haffkine, C.I.E., D. Sc, (1860–1930),” in Communicazione presentate al XXI Congresso Internazionale di Storia della Medicina (Siena, 1968), pp. 22–28, repr. in Medica judaica, 1 , no. 1 (1970), 32–35, and in Journal of the Indian Medical Profession, 17 , no. 4 (1970), 7591–7595; “More on Waldemar Haffkine,” ibid., no. 7 (1970), 7711; “Waldemar M. Haffkine,” in Encyclopedia Judaica (Jerusalem-New York, in press); and “In Honor of Waldemar Haffkine, C.I.E., on the 40th Anniversary of his Death,” in Actes du XXII ^e Congrès International d’Histoire Mèdecine (Bucharest, in press); Mark Popovsky, The Fate of Doctor Haffkine, in Russian (Moscow, 1963); and The Story of Dr. Haffkine, trans. from the Russian by V. Vezey (Moscow, 1965); and Selman A. Waksman, The Brilliant and Tragic Life of W. M. W. Haffkine, Bacteriologist (New Brunswick, N.J., 1964).

Edythe Lutzker