The Serum Run
Twenty teams of dogs ran a life-or-death race against time over Alaska’s frozen trails to bring medicines to desperately sick children.
1925
King George V 1910-1936
Twenty teams of dogs ran a life-or-death race against time over Alaska’s frozen trails to bring medicines to desperately sick children.
1925
King George V 1910-1936
In the icy winter of 1924-25, the town of Nome in Alaska was completely cut off by road, rail, air and sea. When Curtis Welch, Nome’s only doctor, diagnosed diphtheria among the town’s children in mid-January, the race was on to bring thousands of doses of antitoxin from the nearest railway station, 674 miles away over the old Iditarod Trail. American women were among those agog for the latest updates.
THREE cheers for dogs! Again they have proved their dependability. For days the dogs racing to the rescue of Nome have held front-page space and absorbed attention.
Winter-bound, shut off from the world except over deep-covered trails, Nome has an epidemic of diphtheria. The only serum was five years old, and it is supposed to be effective only six months. They used the old serum for what it might be worth and sent out a call for aid. With the temperature running to 30 degrees below zero, it was thought no airship could survive.* Anyhow — “we know what dogs can do, we don’t know about airplanes.” So the dog teams started, and as this is written one of them, after a record-breaking race, has reached Nome with the precious antitoxin.*
At any minute Roy S. Darling, a former navy flyer, may dare the dangers and start with another consignment of serum. Five have died in Nome, thirty are suspected of having the disease and fifty others have been exposed.
* Air transport was still barely out of its infancy in 1925. The civilian authorities were keen to try it, but experienced pilots told them it was madness in the freezing storms raging about Nome.
* The first consignment of serum, 300,000 units in all, arrived at Nome at around 5.30am on Monday 2nd February, 1925, brought in by Gunnar Kaasen and his thirteen-strong team of dogs. In all, there were twenty mushers (sled-drivers) working their dogs in relay, in theory carving up the 674-mile trip into 25-mile stages, regarded as an extreme day’s mush. Time was of the essence: not only were children dying, but the fresh batches of serum were not expected to survive more than six days on the trail owing to the plunging Alaskan temperatures. The dogs and their mushers brought it home with half a day to spare.
1. What is the author aiming to achieve in writing this?
2. Note any words, devices or turns of phrase that strike you. How do they help the author communicate her ideas more effectively?
3. What impression does this passage make on you? How might you put that impression into words?
Based on The English Critic (1939) by NL Clay, drawing on The New Criticism: A Lecture Delivered at Columbia University, March 9, 1910, by J. E. Spingarn, Professor of Comparative Literature in Columbia University, USA.