Romantic Self

After a patient wait, death came last week to Hans Zinsser, bacteriologist, physician, philosopher, poet, ironist, historian, raconteur. At 61, he died of chronic leukemia, a slow-moving, mysterious disease of the blood for which there is no known cure.

By many, Dr. Zinsser was regarded as the world's leading authority on typhus, the ancient plague which is now known to be virus-borne by human lice and rat fleas. Five years ago, in Rats, Lice and History, he traced with surprising charm the red-brown spots of typhus across world history. This year he announced a method for mass production of a typhus vaccine.

Hans Zinsser was born in New York City of German parents from the Rhineland. His father was a prospering chemist. The young man went to Columbia, decided to be a writer, switched to biology, then to medicine. When he saw that most of his patients were scared by his fanatical thoroughness, he turned to research and teaching. During World War I he went to Serbia to fight the typhus which ravaged that country after the Austrian invasion, later served with the U. S. Army in France in the Medical Corps. For the past 17 years he was professor of bacteriology at Harvard, periodically traipsed over the world in pursuit of his typhus research. He once caught the disease himself, was restrained from jumping out of a fourth-story window, he said, by a devoted nurse.

An affectionate, voluble, energetic, terrierlike man, Hans Zinsser had a strong fondness for wine, women, horses, books. Two years ago, returning from a junket to China, he noticed that the sun on ship board turned him not healthy brown but lemon yellow. He knew then that there was something serious the matter with his blood. Back in Boston, he consulted a colleague and friend, who told him, with "affectionate abstinence from any expression of sympathy," that he had leukemia. Looking out at the white sails on the Charles River, Zinsser realized that he was going to die. A great lover of life, he began soon to fall in love with death.

This summer Dr. Zinsser published a transparently disguised autobiography called As I Remember Him--The Biography of R. S. (TIME, July 1). The initials R. S. stood for "Romantic Self." In that book Zinsser revealed that he was an agnostic, that he did not know what lay beyond the last door. But he said that the imminence of death had made his perceptions keener and lovelier. "When he awoke in the mornings," he wrote of himself, "the early sun striking across the bed, the light on the branches of the trees outside his window, the noise of his sparrows, and all the sounds of the awakening street aroused in him all kinds of gentle and pleasing memories of days long past. . . ."

Only a month ago Dr. Zinsser still went to his laboratory every day, jaunty and gay. But he knew the end was near. He was taking X-ray treatments, which did no good. In mid-August he went to Manhattan, entered world-famed Memorial Hospital under the care of his friend, Dr. Cornelius Packard Rhoads. Thirty-six hours before he died, Hans Zinsser lost consciousness.

In his last sonnet he had written: "How good that 'ere the winter comes, I die!"

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