The Bacteriological Detective
"The Bacteriological Detective" is a scientific mystery story featuring Professor Craig Kennedy, a Columbia University chemist and scientific investigator, and his companion Walter Jameson, a newspaper reporter for the Morning Star. The story opens with Kennedy musing that modern criminals miss their opportunities by relying on crude methods like pistols and poison when bacteriology offers far more sophisticated means of committing undetectable crimes. This observation proves immediately prescient when a young woman named Eveline Bisbee arrives at their apartment in a state of near hysteria. She is the ward of James "Jim" Bisbee, a wealthy southern California oil magnate who has recently died of typhoid fever at a private hospital after a mysterious epidemic swept through his country estate, Bisbee Hall in New Jersey. One by one his servants fell ill, the disease seemed to follow him to his New York apartment, and the outbreak continues even after his death. Eveline has been so terrified that she refuses to eat in the apartment or drink unboiled water, convinced that something unnatural is happening. She reveals two additional suspicious circumstances. First, her guardian's new will, recently altered before his death, leaves her expected million dollars intact but redirects the remainder of the estate away from charities to fund the Bisbee School of Mechanical Arts, with his lawyer James Denny named sole trustee. Critically, if Eveline dies without children, her million also flows to this school. Second, she notes that her guardian was famously meticulous about hygiene and health, making it remarkable that he would succumb to typhoid at all. Kennedy and Jameson travel first to a military post on Governor's Island to receive typhoid inoculations, Kennedy having quietly noted from the army's civilian vaccination records that someone else had already sought the same protection three times in the preceding month. They then proceed to Bisbee Hall, where Kennedy conducts exhaustive bacteriological testing of the water supply, wells, milk, and food sources, finding nothing. His attention shifts to the bottles of private spring water that Bisbee always drank exclusively, shipped from his upstate New York camp. The full bottles at the hall test clean, but Kennedy realizes the crucial evidence lies in the empty returned bottles. He retrieves them from the freight station, and through the night he swabs residue from inside the bottles onto agar slides, cultures them at blood heat, and in the morning discovers colonies of the typhoid bacillus. He also detects fingerprints on the outside of the bottles, which he develops using grey powder and photographs for enlargement. None of the fingerprints match those of current servants at the hall. The housekeeper reveals that the cook, Bridget Fallon, left suddenly for New York just days earlier. Kennedy rushes back to the city, engages Inspector O'Connor at police headquarters to locate Bridget, obtain Denny's fingerprints, and secure the original will, while sending Jameson to the city health department with a card to Commissioner Leslie. At the health department, Jameson learns the key to the entire case. Medical researchers have discovered that certain individuals are typhoid carriers, people who harbor and shed the typhoid bacillus without becoming ill themselves. One such carrier, a servant known in the press as Typhoid Bridget, had been responsible for dozens of cases and several deaths across multiple households over several years. She is Bridget Fallon. That evening Kennedy assembles everyone in his university laboratory for a dramatic demonstration using an enlarging stereopticon. He projects the fingerprints recovered from the bottles and shows they match those of a single individual. Commissioner Leslie then explains the phenomenon of typhoid carriers to the assembled group, making clear that a carrier could deliberately contaminate a water supply. Kennedy next projects two handwriting specimens side by side, greatly enlarged: the letter of recommendation Bridget Fallon carried from her previous employer Caswell-Jones, and the altered will. Using the recent work of Dr. Lindsay Johnson on how heart disease leaves distinctive involuntary pulse tremors in handwriting, Kennedy demonstrates that both documents were forged by the same hand, that of someone suffering from a cardiac aneurism, and that Bisbee himself had no heart disease. Kennedy concludes that Denny engineered the entire scheme: forging the will to enrich himself through the fictional school, deliberately introducing typhoid into Bisbee Hall by employing the known carrier Bridget Fallon and positioning her to contaminate the private water supply, and protecting himself through advance vaccination. Bisbee's age and stoutness made his death from typhoid a near certainty once infected. Commissioner Leslie moves through the room with a stethoscope examining each person's heart. When he reaches Denny, he pauses at length. Kennedy impatiently floods the room with electric light. The commissioner announces that a higher court has already rendered judgment: Denny's aneurism has burst and he is dead. Jameson misses his newspaper scoop by escorting the shaken Eveline Bisbee safely home.
By Arthur B. Reeve · First published 1912 · Genre: Detective Fiction, Mystery, Scientific Romance