The room was dank and the air foul. The cabin itself nothing more than flotsam, driftwood, and wooden boards thrown together like so many others prospectors had built on the Sand Spit outside of Nome, Alaska, during its gold rush.
Two Inupiat Eskimo boys were dying and white-haired Dr. Curtis Welch did not know why. Since practicing in Nome in 1906 to this very day—Jan. 21, 1925—he had never seen another case or anything like it. While searching his medical books, he was called to the home of a prominent white Nome family. Their son also had fallen ill. He had the same high fever and shallow breathing the two other boys had. But there was something more here. Welch found membrane covering the interior of the boy's mouth—the telltale sign of diphtheria.
Within hours all three boys were dead, and Welch requested a secret meeting with Nome's Mayor George Maynard. Welch told Maynard he had only 75,000 units of antitoxin that was five years old. He needed at least 30,000 units for each patient.
Nome was iced in for the winter. No ships could get through. With temperatures at or below minus-40 degrees, if they tried to have serum flown in, the pilots of the open-air cockpits of the era would be overcome with the cold and crash, not only dying, but also losing the antitoxin.
The trail to Nenana, where the railroad was located, was 674 miles to the east, and such a trip usually took 30 days by dog team. Worse, said Welch, from the time the serum was exposed to the intense cold, it had only 144 hours before that extreme cold would render the antitoxin dormant.
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