Part two of Dr. Clyde Culbertson’s story, continued from the Sept. 14, issue of the Brown County Democrat.
Today we pick up on Dr. Clyde Culbertson’s story at the end of the war in 1946.
“I was worn out — in a state of mental bankruptcy,” Clyde says. I’d lost a lot of help, equipment was hard to get, the student body was greatly enlarged, and it was becoming ever more difficult for the administration to run the medical school from Bloomington.
“Besides I had that feeling of everything going out and nothing coming in. For me it had become all teaching and not enough learning. Doctor Gatch was about to retire as dean of the medical school. We were considered inseparable, having worked for years as sort of a team. I had been, in effect, a sort of assistant dean.
“There was a good possibility I could have been named to take over from Dr. Gatch as dean of the school. But I needed a change, and I needed it badly. Then Eli Lilly &Company asked me to join their biological research division, which had to be rebuilt. Such research had been neglected during Lilly’s all-out war effort.
“I started with Lilly in February 1946. From 1949 until 1962 I was director of the biological research division at Lilly, supervising the work of 200 persons. And I was a research consultant when I retired from the staff in 1971 under the company policy of mandatory retirement at age 65.
“As a free agent I remained a consultant for Lilly and before long I moved into an office in the Lilly complex at General Hospital. They provide me the use of their laboratory facilities. I’m handy for consultations with their staff people and also do some special projects for them.
“Margaret and I had become Brown County weekenders in 1954. We bought a little place in Tuck A Way Ridge addition, which we enlarged into a full time home an occupied permanently in 1969, a year and a half before I retired from Lilly’s.
“We also bought the lot next door and put up the garage and my own laboratory. I do my own research at will and publish the results in the medical journals. But it’s not for income. In fact, it costs me.
“I get up at 6 a.m. and still commute to the Lilly lab at General Hospital four or five days a week. After a full day up there, I come home and work in my own lab until ten o’clock at night. Ninety-nine percent of the things I do come to nothing, but the other one percent makes up for it. Much of my work is examining diseased human tissue that’s sent to me and for which the cause is unknown.
“I also work out new techniques in staining and try to discover new species of amoebas, one-celled animals, some of which I guess you could call germs of a kind. I’ve been developing this type of work for about 20 years.
“In a vaccine experiment with monkeys and mice I found an amoeba which can cause a malignant brain disease. If it gets into the nose it can work up through the nerves into the brain without entering the blood stream. The strain is common to most soils and can be taken into the nose by means of dust or water. When others started to look for it in their countries, it showed up and got to be recognized all over the world.
“As just one example, 17 kids were found to have died from this strain of amoeba from swimming in the modern swimming pool in Czechoslovakia over a period of years. Chlorine does not destroy it. The amoeba entered the pool from mud that was tracked in and thrived on bacteria it found in the sand filter. Similar but lesser instances occurred in other places including Australia (near Adelaide) and in central Florida. In experiments with animals, we have found this strain can also find its way into the lungs, or the heart.
“For many years this amoeba had been missed by scientists using routine, established staining processes. And symptoms of the disease can easily be confused and attributed to other causes. Dr. Culbertson also pointed out that, some years ago, malaria was hard to diagnose in this country, in areas where occurrences of that disease was suspected. Symptoms were sometimes confused with those of arsenic poisoning. He determined in his laboratory that the unexplained death of a Bedford woman was due to malaria and the following year suggested that doctors of four Evansville children look for malaria as the cause of their illness. They looked for malaria and found it.
“The same year he gave a talk in Terre Haute on such findings. Vigo County, which had 18 reported cases of malaria that year, started looking and uncovered 1,000 cases in the county during the next 12 months.
“Health authorities got an anti-mosquito campaign under way and almost freed the county of malaria after one summer of spraying.”
To be continued.
This original story was written by Dick Reed and appeared in the Sept. 4, 1974, issue of the Brown County Democrat. Submitted by Pauline Hoover with the Brown County Historical Society.
