The trouble began with a swelling on my leg that soon made walking a
painful process. In a day or so I was retching and feverish and so off balance
that I fell about on getting out of bed. Fortunately, my local lazar house
happens to be a great London teaching hospital. I have reason to be grateful
for this high-tech world of modern medicine. A culture grown from the drained
abscess was identified by a specialised laboratory, as ‘nocardia’. It meant
nothing to me.

The first antibiotic they tried brought me out in a textbook rash, but
my fever continued to flourish. The second sent my chart down as fast as
the recent performance of Maxwell shares, to the delight of the prescribing
microbiologist. After a week or so I was allowed home.

Less than a fortnight after this first apparently successful zapping
of the infection I developed more fever and alarming headaches. Soon I was
back in the familiar topography of the hospital. This time the affected
region was cerebrospinal and the effect nastier than before. Weeks passed
of saline drips, pints – probably gallons – of the antibiotic, a feeding
tube in my nose and endless tests. I emerged, thin and shaky but optimistic
two-and-a-half months after admission. Since then, touch the nearest mould-free
piece of wood, all has seemed well.

Nocardia is not exactly a household word, so being ill from it confers
an excusable distinction on sufferers. Feeling a vested interest in the
subject, I find that there is a surprisingly large literature on or related
to it. Nocardia is known to professionals as an actinomycete, or in plain
English, a mould that forms rays or branches. The word is from the Greek
for a ray or beam and that for mushroom. It is named after Edmond Isidore
Etienne Nocard (1850-1903). He was an important French veterinary microbiologist
and a favourite pupil of Pasteur. He was the first to identify the bacteria
of various animal afflictions, such as farcy and contagious mastitis. He
originated TB testing of cattle.

Not surprisingly since they are so numerous, the classification of moulds
is very complicated and it has taken decades since Nocard’s day to sort
them out. Perversely, the branching organisms isolated by Nocard from cattle
on Guadeloupe is not now included in the genus. A non-scientist would be
more than rash to attempt to describe the relationships and characteristics
of the various nocardiae. They are ‘a widely distributed group of bacteria
that occur in a wide range of natural and man-made environments, including
soil, sewage, water, biodeteriorated material and’ (as I know) ‘in the live
tissues of plants, animals and man,’ according to WWC Topley and G. S. Wilson
in their seminal Systematic Bacteriology. Infections in human beings can
be external, pulmonary or systemic. ‘They appear to invade the host either
by direct inhalation of contaminated dust particles or through soil contaminated
wounds’ (Topley and Wilson again).

It sounds dire, but infection by nocardia is not common. Those at risk
seem to be the already ill and/or those undergoing immunosuppression. (I
was myself taking steroids for another complaint.) Authorities cite between
2 and 15 cases annually in individual hospitals in the US. However, ‘they
can be recognised with certainty only by laboratory means, and their prevalence
is almost certainly underestimated,’ say Topley and Wilson.

With sources so common, it is probably a waste of time speculating on
how an individual case of nocardia was picked up. More likely, the dust
of a demolition site rather than the kitchen. Even so, I am now very careful
about sell-by dates and the inside of my fridge. Moulds will never seem
quite the same again.

John Hewish is a freelance science writer.

A good case can be made for saying that the US led the world in keveloping
a modern patent system. A right to intellectual property, expressed as patents
and copyrights, was included in the constitution of 1787. The US passed
the first modern patent act in 1790, opened the first purpose-built patent
office in 1836, and had the first library and examiners.

The ringing declarations of the constitution did not, of course, include
those who not only had no property but were themselves property. The story
of Afro-American invention adds some bizarre chapters to the endless tale
of man’s inhumanity to man, and some inspiring ones too. In the 1850s a
slave, known only as Ned, invented a labour-saving cotton machine. The Attorney
General ruled that ‘a machine invented by a slave though it be new and useful,
cannot be patented’. Joseph Davis, a contemporary, was refused a patent
for a shallow-water propeller invented by his slave Benjamin Montgomery.

Davis’s brother Jefferson Davis became the president of the Confederate
States. he passed the iniquitous breakaway act that gave a slave’s master
‘all the rights to which a patentee is entitled by law’.

Some freed slaves took out patents but it was not until full emancipation
after the Civil War ended in 1865 that black inventors had the right to
apply for protection for their ideas.

Successful invention became powerful evidence to counter widespread
belief in the innate inferiority of black people, so the literature of black
innovation is surprisingly early and abundant. In the last part of the 19th
century something like a propaganda war was waged in the press. Not all
Southern writers went as far as the redneck who suggested that black invention
proved the benefits of slavery: ‘For whoever heard of a free negro ever
inventing anything?’ A black patent examiner, Henry E Baker, devoted his
life to compiling four volumes of patents awarded to Afro-Americans. They
made possible special displays at the Chicago World’s Fair, the Cotton Centennial
in new Orleans in 1884 and at the Southern Exposition, Atlanta. The American
exhibit at the famous Paris Exhibition of 1900 also included a section that
displayed 350 new patents granted to black inventors. But controversy surrounded
such special pleading just as it did the work of the pioneer of black craft
education, Booker T Washington at his Tuskegee Normal Institute.

I had to swallow some misgivings about the ethnic approach to invention
but I found this an enjoyable and informative Smilesian panorama, not only
of invention but of the whole Afro-American contribution to the material
progress of the US. A text-and-picture book, The Real McCoy was produced
to accompany an exhibition at the Anacostia Museum, one of the constellation
of Smithsonian Institutions in the Washington district.

The book’s opening details of African influence in the early colonial
period were new to me. Technical transfers at that time included improvements
in pottery, rice cultivation and, more startlingly, examples of inoculation
long before Lady Wortley Montagu and Edward Jenner introduced the practice
in Britain. (When Cotton Mather asked his ‘negro-man’ whether he had had
‘ye small pox’, he replied succinctly, ‘yes and no.’)

Later, in the 19th century, Afro-American invention also reflected the
pattern of employment. Advances came notably in agriculture, shipping (especially
whaling) and on the rialways. Some believe that McCormick’s reaper and Whitney’s
cotton gin were black inventions. Lewis Temple, a New Bedford blacksmith,
invented the first toggel harpoon, and Elijah McCoy who worked on the Michigan
Central railroad was 50 times a patentee. Many Afro-American inventions
were improvements to existing technology; one of the few that revolutionised
an industry was Matzeliger’s machinery for shoe-lasting.

After the great migration to the northern cities at the end of the century,
Afro-Americans began to make their mark in the new, highly technical industries.
James chronicles in some detail the careers of two who made it to the first
industrial research departments. Granville Woods invented telephone and
telegraph systems, and found his own firm in Cincinnati. Known as the ‘black
Edison’, he succeeded in patent disputes with no less than his namesake.
Lewis Latimer, son of an escaped slave, worked for Graham Bell, Hiram Maxim
and Thomas Edison in the heroic age of electric lighting development, which
he significantly influenced.

In format and content this is very much a museum book, a valuable short
introduction to a sectarian subject, with excellent references and a bibliography.
As to what part ethnicity plays in promoting invention, I gladly leave that
to Hans Eysenck and his co-experts. Racial prejudice has certainly frustrated
it.

John Hewish is a freelance science writer.