Harry Plotz was an American bacteriologist, physician and military.
Background
He was born on April 17, 1890 in Patterson, New Jersey, United States, the eldest of the three children and the only son of Joseph Plotz and Ida (Adelson) Plotz. Both parents were born in Poland; his father was superintendent of the Prudential Insurance Co. in Brooklyn, New York.
Education
Plotz attended Newark schools and, for a time, Boys High School in Brooklyn. He was a brilliant student and also won medals as a runner. He entered a combined undergraduate and medical course at Columbia University and that university's College of Physicians and Surgeons and was awarded his M. D. degree in 1913, graduating first in his class. During his medical education he was engrossed in bacteriology.
Career
Upon graduation he received an internship in pathology at Mt. Sinai Hospital, in New York City, and entered into investigations to show that Brill's disease was a mild form of epidemic typhus fever. It is said that he usually worked at the laboratory bench for twenty hours each day. He succeeded in growing an anaerobic organism which, on the basis of serologic and animal inoculation experiments, he believed to be the etiologic agent of the disease. Presumably, he was to report his exciting findings for the first time at the meeting of the Association of American Physicians at Atlantic City on May 13, 1914.
On the preceding day, the front page of the New York Times reported the essentials and significance of his research, extolling his accomplishment. A tempest of criticism immediately arose from members of the august association who accused Plotz of unethical prepublication in the lay press, and he was not called upon to present his results at their meeting.
A preliminary report of the work was published in the Journal of the American Medical Association on May 16, 1914. Plotz's work continued to be supported at Mt. Sinai, and in April of the next year he reported to the New York Pathological Society the details of his findings and of the preparation of an antityphus vaccine from his organism. At the suggestion of William H. Welch, pathologist of the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, the organism was named Bacillus typhi exanthematicus but became known as Plotz bacillus.
In the summer of 1915, Plotz and his associate, Dr. George Baehr, joined the American Red Cross Sanitary Commission in Serbia to test his isolation methods and vaccine under field conditions. On his return from Europe, Zinsser reported to a meeting of the New York Academy of Medicine in October that Plotz's work had been verified in the field. Later that month the entire staff of the Lady Paget Hospital in Uskub was captured by the Bulgarians, and Plotz was interned with the others although he was allowed to continue work. He returned to New York in the summer of 1916.
Plotz then entered the United States Army as a major assigned to Surgeon General Gorgas' staff in Washington to work on antityphus sanitary measures. He established procedures and designed equipment and installations for the delousing of returning troops. He was discharged in 1919 as a lieutenant colonel.
He sailed to Europe and became medical advisor to the Jewish Joint Distribution Committee in charge of its relief expedition in Eastern Europe. He then worked in the laboratories of the Institut Pasteur in Paris. Plotz stayed on at the Institut Pasteur. By this time it had been demonstrated that typhus fever was caused by Rickettsia prowazekii and that the Plotz bacillus had no etiologic role in the disease. Plotz remained at the Institut Pasteur until the fall of France in 1940, having become chef de service in 1931.
At the outbreak of World War II he came to Zinsser's laboratory at Harvard as a visiting scientist and, with Zinsser and John Enders, developed a chick embryo tissue-culture method of cultivating rickettsia for the preparation of typhus fever vaccine in quantity. In 1941 he again entered the army as lieutenant colonel and established and assumed directorship of the Division of Virus and Rickettsial Diseases at the Army Medical Center, Washington. Plotz made several trips abroad in the course of these studies. Unfortunately most of the work of this period remained unpublished due to wartime restrictions.
He retired from the service as a colonel in 1945 after a coronary attack but stayed on at the laboratory as a consultant to the secretary of war. He suffered a final heart attack at his desk in the laboratory and died several days later, on January 6, 1947, at Walter Reed Hospital, Washington.
Achievements
Personality
He had personal warmth, gracious manners, and his captivating charisma and charm. He continually praised and credited his co-workers.
Connections
On November 24, 1920, he married Ella Sachs, a member of a wealthy German-Jewish family. On April 13, 1922, his wife died in childbirth in Paris.