I cannot help looking back to those early days spent in with a longing which amounts to nostalgia, for the place which seemed a fairyland to a youth … - David Grandison Fairchild

There were strange contrasts in the little microcosm which then constituted the . Some of the men seemed to be relics of a former era, still unaware of the tremendous strides which had taken place in the use of the microscope. In vivid contrast to these fossils, were such men as , whose laboratory adjoined mine up under the old mansard roof.
Late one afternoon, long after most of the Department had gone home, I heard Theobold Smith’s light step behind me and his enthusiastic voice calling, “Fairchild, would you like to see the cause of ?” After months of work, he had just discovered the parasite in a drop of steer’s blood which he had taken from a cattle tick. It was a momentous discovery, the first of its kind.
I had heard much about the terrific losses of cattle on the plains. Whenever herds of domestic cattle were driven from Texas to the slaughter houses in Chicago and Kansas City, they died by the hundreds if their paths happened to cross a trail made by the longhorn Texas cattle of the plains. Apparently the native Texas cattle were not susceptible to the fever themselves, but were passing it on somehow to their less fortunate brethren.

... one of my playmates, a boy of my own age, broke his leg while riding in the buggy with his father. His foot slipped from the dashboard and caught in the wheel. It was a , and our family physician shook his shaggy head as he said, “I fear that he cannot live.” The boy’s leg was amputated immediately. Later word came that gangrene had set in. And then the funeral.
To the medical profession of those days, a fracture which broke the skin, technically a compound fracture, meant almost certain death. Modern methods of disinfection were still unknown. In fact, it was not until seven years after this that I first heard the word “,” when my classmate painted for me a world filled with bacteria, floating particles in the air, microscopic plants. Only those of us who lived before the days of can realize what an amazing thought it seemed when first presented to the world.

There were five of us children, and the setting of our childhood was quite ideal. The and it contained all of the elements necessary to develop happy, healthy boys and girls. There was a brook teeming with water life; s to tap when the sap ran fresh in the spring; and great trees which stood here and there on the campus and were, in some way, my childhood companions. My earliest recollection is of myself as a toddler searching for their nuts in the frosty grass.