A bestselling author is seeking to restore the reputation of a wronged Jewish scientist, who saved millions of lives by creating the world’s first vaccines against the bubonic plague and cholera – only to fall victim to antisemitism and to be almost air-brushed from history since his death in 1930.
In dramas planned for the stage and screen, Paul Twivy will pay tribute to the extraordinary achievements of Waldemar Haffkine, a pioneering microbiologist recognised by the scientist, Joseph Lister, as a saviour of humanity – but who was brought down by racist doctors within the British Raj while he was working in India.
Evidence was falsified in a legal case from which he never recovered. He returned to Britain and, even after he was exonerated, he was not allowed to resume his former job.
The historian, Simon Schama, is acting as an unofficial adviser on the scripts, having researched Haffkine for his book, Foreign Bodies: the Terror of Contagion, the Ingenuity of Science.
He likened the case to that of Capt Alfred Dreyfus, the French officer of Alsatian Jewish descent who – barely a decade earlier – was accused of spying on the basis of forged evidence and false testimony in a case fuelled by antisemitism.
Schama wrote: “The ‘Haffkine affair’ had become akin to a medical Dreyfus case, not least because, faced with conclusive evidence of a gross miscarriage of justice, the authorities resisted any outright admission of wrongdoing.”
Yet Haffkine was a man who would stop at nothing to save lives, even risking his own life by injecting himself with bubonic plague and cholera to develop his vaccines.
Twivy said: “There is no doubt that we would not have survived pandemics without Haffkine, even though he’s not known. He developed vaccines against two of the biggest killers ever. He is literally the most important scientist in terms of the number of lives he saved.
“But he is almost invisible outside microbiology. A lot of scientists don’t even know his name. He’s been eliminated from history.”
Haffkine was born in Odesa, now in Ukraine, and was a shy man whose talent brought him to the attention of Louis Pasteur, the French microbiologist, and then the British government, which sent him to Colonial India to tackle cholera and the bubonic plague.
He arrived in India in 1893 and tested vaccinations that were dismissed by his British colleagues. They could not, for example, understand how an intestinal disease could be cured by a subcutaneous injection of a cholera microbe. Yet, when he vaccinated 116 members of an isolated village, the only deaths were among the unvaccinated.
Twivy said: “But a number of doctors within the British Raj were envious of him and extremely antagonistic to him because he was Jewish, Russian and he wasn’t a doctor.”
Their antisemitism drove them to accuse him of killing 19 people in the Punjab in 1902, who died from tetanus poisoning after being injected.
Twivy said: “Haffkine had followed meticulous procedures, but they decided this was a great way of getting rid of him. They accused him of inadequate hygiene procedures.”
He added that the poisoning was caused by an assistant’s failure to sterilise a vial’s stopper that he had dropped in the soil: “The antisemitic doctors knew that and hid that particular evidence. Tens of millions of Haffkine’s vaccines were given around the world and there was never again a single example of tetanus, but he was shamed by evidence that was falsified or suppressed.
“A British Raj court was presided over by three people, all of whom wanted him to fail. We have unearthed all the details of the trial and the falsified evidence. It deserves to be one of the most famous mistrials in history.”
Haffkine died in obscurity in Switzerland, forgotten in the west, while appreciated in India.
Twivy is the co-author of Change the World for a Fiver, which has sold 1.2m copies worldwide and aimed to inspire people to use everyday actions to change the world. He also wrote Be Your Own Politician, calling for citizens, government and business to come together.
In researching Haffkine, he has tried to understand a man who put his own health at risk for the sake of others: “He injected himself with twice the dose he thought was needed, unsupervised, to test vaccines. He had not one ounce of self-pity or self-regard, despite all the antagonisms he faced. Where does somebody get this strength?”
A public reading of the play will take place at JW3 in London on 10 June, with Haffkine played by Ben Caplan, who has performed with the Royal Shakespeare Company and in Call The Midwife.
