Book Review: Eleven Blue Men by Berton Roueché
September 25, 1944, New York City. An elderly man collapses on the sidewalk. When a police officer investigates, he discovers the man has turned blue. The blue man is rushed to the hospital where the doctors are baffled by his condition. Worse, he’s only the first of eleven blue men!
Berton Roueché (1910-1994) was a medical writer for the magazine The New Yorker. His “The Annals of Medicine” feature covered various interesting medical cases and topics, and this 1953 collection is primarily focused on investigations carried out by the New York City Bureau of Preventable Diseases in the 1940s. Some names have been changed to protect patient privacy.
The first story in the volume is “A Pig from Jersey”, about an outbreak of trichinosis. The cases are traced to a German-American Schlactfest, but if that’s the cause, why are only a handful of people who ate there affected?
The final story, “The Fog”, takes place in a Pennsylvania factory town as a heavy fog falls at Halloween time. A fog that kills. But since this is a medical story rather than a Stephen King novel, the culprit is “merely” that a temperature inversion trapped toxic smoke in the fog (what later got the nickname “smog”) for a couple of days, making anyone with breathing difficulties or other medical weaknesses just that much more vulnerable.
The title story eventually reveals that the blue men all ate at a particularly poorly run restaurant that got its salt supply mixed up with sodium nitrite, which tastes similar, but is poisonous to humans. The reason only these men collapsed and turned blue is that they all put extra “salt” in their oatmeal.
The odd chapters out are a history of gout in general, and a visit to a pharmaceutical company to learn how they discover new antibiotics. “Or we could have just rediscovered streptomycin again.”
The medical mystery chapters are “procedurals”, playing down the sensational aspects to concentrate on the doctors doing tests, interviewing witnesses, and pounding the pavement to figure out the source of outbreaks. As such, the book won a Raven award from the Mystery Writers of America. Sometimes the writing is a bit dry, but the subject matter is fascinating and clearly presented.
The stories are also a time capsule of life in the 1940s, when smallpox vaccinations weren’t mandatory, America hadn’t gotten serious about improving air quality, and decent drugs to combat leprosy were just coming on the market. The good old days indeed!
Mr. Roueché put out several more collections of his columns over his career, as well as some fictional thrillers. All the collections are fascinating, so if you can’t find this one you won’t go wrong with another.
Content note: unpleasant medical descriptions, outdated terms for ethnic groups, maybe a touch of period sexism.
My copy had an unusual bookmark, a ticket to a 1964 University of Minnesota Medical School event, which tells me a bit about the previous owner.
Highly recommended to fans of medical mystery stories.
