So, happy 90th anniversary to this diary entry, whose last line you will not be able to predict.
It’s the opening paragraph of writer/explorer Robert Byron’s book The Road to Oxiana, about his journey around the Middle East in 1933–4.
Historian Paul Fussell said of the book:
You can pick copies up quite cheaply on abebooks, and find out more on this blog, but if you know anything about this blog, you may not be surprised to know that we’ve finished talking about the book now.
Yes, I’m interested in the idea that all whales have syphilis. Obviously. One might simply respond to this notion by being amused, and perhaps repeating the newly found factoid down the pub. Or one might google ‘whale syphilis’.
When I googled ‘whale syphilis’, I came across Canada’s University of Victoria, and specifically its professor of biochemistry and microbiology, Caroline Cameron, who studies spirochetes and other pathogens in marine mammals. Not only did I email her; she replied.
Apparently, the answer is that whales can catch the herpes virus, and sea lions and seals can be colonised by Leptospira, “a spirochete related to the spirochete that causes syphilis”. Humans, too, “have a plethora of spirochete bacteria in their mouth”.
Toothed whales (also being mammals) may well, too, “including ones of the Treponema genus (same genus as the bacterium that causes syphilis). By the 1930s, the darkfield microscope was being used to diagnose syphilis and visualize Treponema pallidum…”
At the time, “syphilis numbers were extremely high worldwide (this was right before penicillin), and whaling was also prevalent. Perhaps someone, somewhere, looked at the teeth of whales under a microscope…”
If they had, they would have seen “the characteristic corkscrew shape of a bacterium, and suggested the theory that whales have syphilis?” And there, I think, we (almost certainly) have it. You’re all very welcome.
And thank you, Professor Cameron (who is using her knowledge more wisely than I am, and trying to develop a syphilis vaccine, which could well be useful when antibiotic resistance really comes for us as a species.
Oh yes — I nearly forgot. If you prefer meaty history to obscure questions of biology, though, today is also the 351st anniversary of that time the Dutch killed and ate their prime minister.
Which was nice.
