Page:Transactions of the Royal Society of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene, volume 1.djvu/146

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118
FRITZ SCHAUDINN:


With his mind still hankering after tropical work, Schaudinn, soon after his report on Treponema pallidum had appeared, asked for six months' leave to study at the Hamburg School of Tropical Medicine, and to complete his arrangements for joining Professor Koch in an investigation of trypanosomiasis in East Africa. About this time, too, he received from London what is stated to have been a most alluring offer. Possibly some of those here have fuller information of the circumstances of this temptation than is at my disposal; but, however that may be, the attempt failed. With pardonable gratification, the Continental record states that, after some hesitation, Schaudinn's patriotism triumphed, and even for the great stores of gold which Albion so lavishly bestows on her men of science, he refused to leave his people and his country.

In Hamburg, Schaudinn continued and extended his observations on the relations of spirochsetse and trypanosomes, and further studied transitional forms, such as he had noted in Plasmodium ziemanni, and which he believed to indicate metamorphic phases in the life of various protozoa, but his work was much interrupted by illness. Previously, as we have seen, he had had two attacks of amoebic dysentery; the first he had cured by the free use of calomel, but the second infection was of more malignant type, and it resisted treatment. He, perhaps, regarded it too lightly; at all events, he had no apprehension of the issue; and on the appointment of Director of the Department of Protozoology in the Tropical Institute at Hamburg being offered to him, he definitely accepted it. Before taking up duty which was so completely in accord with his tastes, it was, however, necessary for him to return to Berlin to start the work of the new Institute. There he spent the winter, with but slight improvement in his health, and when he returned to