33 pages • 1 hour read
Richard PrestonThe Demon in the Freezer
Nonfiction | Book | Adult | Published in 2002A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
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Chapter 1 Summary: Something in the Air
Preston’s account opens with a description of the lifestyle and activities of Robert Stevens, a tabloid photograph retoucher who was for a time employed by the National Enquirer. Late in September or early in October of 2001, Stevens was struck by an illness that progressed rapidly through his body and ended his life. Sherif Zaki and a group of his colleagues at the Federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) performed the autopsy on Stevens; this team quickly determined that Stevens had died as the result of exposure to anthrax spores. As Zaki was arriving at these conclusions, an investigation of Stevens’s movements yielded a troubling discovery: the presence of anthrax in the mail system at American Media, the company that employed Stevens just before his death.
Later in October of the same year, a letter containing an ominous powder arrived at the offices of Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle. Similar anthrax letters were directed to media outlets including CBS, NBC, and ABC. After gathering samples of the powder directed to Daschle’s office, federal agents made their way to the United States Army Medical Research Institute of Infections Diseases (USAMRIID), where the anthrax samples were handed over to a researcher named John Ezzell. The anthrax letters were also quickly brought to the attention of Peter Jahrling, USAMRIID’s senior scientist. Jahrling’s duties, in part, involved finding a way to explain the recently surfaced anthrax to the White House without causing undue alarm: instead of designating the anthrax as a weapon, he and a colleague, Colonel Ed Eitzen, decided to characterize the anthrax as “professional” and “energetic” in nature.
Jarhling, however, was concerned about more than the anthrax itself. Especially concerning was the possibility that the anthrax had been laced with smallpox, which had been eradicated by 2001 but which is generally considered the most devastating disease known to the human species. Much of Jahrling’s research for the previous two years had revolved around laboratory tests that would yield new remedies in the event of a smallpox outbreak. Acting on his concerns, Jahrling assigned one of his USAMRIID colleagues, Tom Geisbert, to use an electron microscope to inspect the anthrax—with the intention of figuring out if smallpox were an element of this apparent bioweapon.
Chapter 2 Summary: The Dreaming Demon
The next chapter of The Demon in the Freezer shifts its focus to 1970. That year, a man in his twenties Peter Los (a pseudonym assigned by Preston) returned to his family in Germany. Los had studied to become an electrician, but had spent portions of his early adulthood traveling with other young people interested in communes and counter-culture; he reached India with a group of fellow hippies and wanderers, but was struck with hepatitis. After Peter settled back into his small hometown of Meschede, an illness that began in red patches and eventually produced groups of pustules broke out over his body. Los was quarantined at the St. Walberga hospital, while a sample taken from his body was transported to Karl Heinz Richter, a smallpox expert in Düsseldorf, who confirmed that Los had been stricken with smallpox.
Richter was well prepared for a smallpox outbreak; just three years earlier, he had formulated a plan designed to address just such a crisis. Acting swiftly, Richter contacted the WHO (World Health Organization) and began administering vaccinations in the vicinity of St. Walberga. Soon, the vaccination effort encompassed the entire Meschede area. Although Richter’s efforts were efficient and well organized, Richter could not prevent casualties entirely. Among those who became infected with smallpox was a nursing student and prospective nun Barbara Birke (another of Preston’s fabricated names). Birke had never seen Los, but she was overcome with a form of the virus known as “hemorrhagic smallpox.” Smallpox took Birke’s life, though Los ultimately survived, as did other individuals from around Meschede who bonded in the face of the local smallpox crisis.
After the outbreak ran its course, Richter and his colleagues decided to figure out exactly how the smallpox had spread from Peter Los to the other people who became infected. An aerosols expert was summoned to St. Walberga; this man set up a soot machine in Peter Los’s onetime room. The emitted soot seeped through small cracks and ascended the hospital walls, a fact that may well explain why patients on the floors above Peter Los’s room were attacked by the virus. Even without fully taking this spreading pattern into account, Richter and an American doctor named Paul Wehrle had strategically used powerful vaccines to keep smallpox—which can bounce from victim to victim, rapidly multiplying the number of people infected—from moving beyond Meschede. Since the 1970s, the virus has not in any way appeared in the region.
Chapter 1-2 Analysis
Readers who remember the 2001 anthrax letter attacks may already be alert to some of the larger perils—the cost of cleanup, the sense of nationwide panic—that attended this instance of bioterror. For Preston in "Something in the Air," however, highlighting the broad social and political facts of bioterrorism is not enough. Instead, what Preston provides here and elsewhere in The Demon in the Freezer is a ground-level view of the individuals affected by bioweapons. He does not begin with a clear discussion of bioweaponry: instead, the first pages of the book offer a leisurely look at the life of Robert Stevens, "a kindhearted man" who "filed the barbs off his fishing hooks so that he could release a lot of the fish he caught" and "took care of feral cats that lived in the swamps around his house" (4). The fact that Stevens's life has so little to do with bioweapons is exactly the point. Indeed, a lethal agent such as anthrax is frightening precisely because it can strike so suddenly, disrupting the otherwise peaceful life of an individual who, like Stevens, would never have imagined that his life could be so easily endangered.
After discussing Stevens's case at length, Preston switches focus to Peter Jahrling and the other researchers at USAMRIID, and in the process, raises the possibility that the anthrax letters were laced with smallpox. Then Preston switches focus, yet again, to consider the smallpox outbreak that ravaged Meschede. Such shifts can be disorienting, but they do serve important purposes in terms of the storytelling and message behind Preston's entire project. In part, they create a strong sensation of suspense; the historical facts discussed in The Demon in the Freezer are, of course, public knowledge, but a fair number of readers may be unfamiliar with Jahrling and Geisbert's exact findings. By keeping such information in reserve, Preston imparts narrative momentum to his account as a whole.
Yet, Preston's shift from the near present to the decades old smallpox outbreak that is the focus of “The Dreaming Demon" is essential to the narrative for another reason. To underscore the severity of smallpox as a bioterror threat—and to get to the core of Jahrling and Geisbert's concerns—Preston needs to explain the human costs of this disease. Like anthrax, smallpox can strike down the most unsuspecting of victims, people such as the easygoing Peter Los (who mostly seemed to be ill with hepatitis) or the pious Barbara Birke (who avoided direct or unsafe contact with Los himself). Unlike anthrax, smallpox is famous for torturing its victims with pustules and hemorrhages, the latter of which emerged in the case of Birke: "The red spots merged and flooded together, until much of her skin turned deep red, and her face turned purplish black" (50). With such descriptions, Preston demonstrates that smallpox is a fearsome disease not simply because it is highly contagious, but because it assaults the bodies of its victims in a manner that is itself horrific.
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