Can an epidemic become a social disease?

Christopher Isherwood's book was published in Spanish under the title Goodbye to Berlin , and was translated by Jaime Gil de Biedma under the supervision of editor Mario Muchnik. Within its pages, one senses the rise of Nazism, with all its trappings, terror, and ideology. But let's get our bearings.

Because the story we're bringing to the table today has to do with the catastrophe of Nazism and begins long before its emergence, on July 6, 1885, when Joseph Meister—a 9-year-old boy—was bitten to the bone by a rabid dog he had previously provoked with a stick. With this in mind, the boy was taken to a small Parisian laboratory on Rue Ulm to be treated by Dr. Louis Pasteur, who was the one who treated him. In his diary, he would record:

“Badly bitten on the index finger of his right hand, on his thighs and on his leg by the same rabid dog that tore his trousers, knocked him to the ground and would have devoured him had it not been for the arrival of a bricklayer armed with two iron bars who brought him down.”

At that time, Pasteur had been working for some time on the development of an experimental rabies vaccine , and until then, he had only tested it on rodents, dogs, and rabbits. But as the virus was spreading through the child's body, Pasteur decided to try it before it began to replicate in the nervous system. The treatment lasted 10 days and was inoculated "under a fold of skin with half a syringe of spinal cord from a rabbit that had died of rabies," as Pasteur himself wrote in his diary. The result was positive, and that decision gave Pasteur sufficient scientific confidence to launch the famous Institute that would bear his name.

When, years later, the Germans entered Paris marching to the beat of the St. Lawrence March and arrived at the Pasteur Institute, they encountered resistance at the door from a 64-year-old man. That man was none other than Joseph Meister, who ended his life as a doorman at the institute and, unable to prevent the Nazi officers from entering, decided to end his own life on June 24, 1940. He did so with his revolver; that's what the story goes, although his decision was due to the combination of other causes caused by the climate that prevailed in Paris with the rise of Nazism . According to legend, five years later, on April 30, 1945, a besieged Adolf Hitler put the barrel of his pistol in his mouth and pulled the trigger.

But even with this, Nazism has not been eradicated; its roots continue to thrive and manifest themselves in times of economic crisis. Just as the relationship between human beings and pathogenic organisms is part of our evolution, the relationship between political idealism and economic crises is part of our most recent history.

And as a symmetry for this whole relationship of chances, it is worth noting here that, under the microscope, the particle of the rabies virus (of the Lyssavirus genus) has the shape of a bullet, just like that other rabies bullet that split Europe in two and that Christopher Isherwood managed to see before it was fired.

The Stone Axe is a section where Montero Glez , with a desire for prose, exercises his particular siege on scientific reality to demonstrate that science and art are complementary forms of knowledge.