The Cement Hall

1915 · Tetanus Antitoxin Horses · Work 1049 of 1,871

A long bare hall of red brick and grey concrete at an old brickworks near Marburg on a June morning, newly fitted out as a stable, sunlight through high windows of small panes, a row of wooden horse stalls, brown horses, fresh straw on the floor, the man, a man of sixty-one, bald head, trimmed grey beard, in a dark overcoat, one hand on the neck of a brown horse, alone in the aisle, on a wooden table a crate of corked glass bottles of clear pale yellow liquid, all plain and unmarked.

Who
Emil von Behring (1854–1917) founded serum therapy, a new way of treating infectious diseases. Born on 15 March 1854 in Hansdorf in West Prussia, today Ławice in Poland, he was the fifth of thirteen children of a village schoolteacher. Only a scholarship to the Military Medical Academy in Berlin allowed him to study, in return for service as an army doctor. In 1888 he joined Robert Koch as an assistant. With Shibasaburo Kitasato and his friend Erich Wernicke he developed a remedy for diphtheria: antibodies from the blood serum of immunised animals are injected into the sick. In Prussia diphtheria had killed some 45,000 people a year on average between 1875 and 1887, 98 per cent of them children and young people; the serum halved child deaths from the disease. From 1894 the Hoechst dye works produced it, and Behring received half the profits. In 1901 he won the first Nobel Prize in Medicine and was ennobled; in 1904 he founded his own works in Marburg. From 1907 to 1910 he was treated in a sanatorium for severe depression. He was called the "saviour of the children" and, in the First World War, the "saviour of the soldiers". He died in Marburg on 31 March 1917.
The moment
With the First World War, demand for tetanus serum to protect wounded soldiers against lockjaw rose sharply, and shortages of horses, vets and women packers dominated the first year of the war at Behring's works in Marburg. The serum was obtained from the blood of immunised horses. In March 1915 the Behringwerke produced two million doses of tetanus serum for the German army. On 24 May 1915 the supervisory board counted 79 serum horses, 62 for tetanus, eleven for diphtheria and three for dysentery; among the 47 employees were eight grooms and 25 women packers. On Tuesday, 1 June 1915, the lease began on a new stable: the cement hall of the old brickworks in the Hinkelbach valley near Marbach, which Behring had bought in 1913. The hall was to take serum horses and a room for the grooms, with space for hay in the loft. The picture places Behring, 61 years old and scientific director of the works, in the hall that morning, one hand on a horse's neck, a crate of serum bottles on the table.
The other side
The hall belonged to Behring himself: the lease was between him and the Behringwerke. The company that bore his name did very well out of the war. In March 1917 the supervisory board recorded turnover of 850,000 marks, 709,000 of it from tetanus serum, and a profit of 450,000 marks. According to Marburg's Behring researchers, his business letters show his "pursuit of money, power and influence"; partners felt treated "like silly boys". On 13 April 1915 the Bremen merchant Carl Cremer, a member of the board, wrote to him that he could understand how a man with almost nothing but successes became an autocrat. When his former colleague Erich Wernicke lost his professorship during the war and asked him for money, Behring refused.

What the sources leave open: That Behring stood in the stable on 1 June 1915 is not documented; the date is the start of the lease. An undated photograph from his archive shows him supervising blood collection from a serum horse. What the cement hall looked like is not described; hall, stalls, coat colour and bottles are typified. The statement that the hall was a stable as early as March 1915 contradicts the chronology on the same page; the work follows the chronology.

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