Eleven Blue Men
First edition
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| Author | Berton Roueché |
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| Language | English |
| Publisher | Boston : Little, Brown |
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Publication date
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1953 |
| Pages | 215 |
| OCLC | 2008402 |
Eleven Blue Men, and Other Narratives of Medical Detection is an award winning collection of twelve true short stories written by Berton Roueché and published in 1953. Each story, including the titular story Eleven Blue Men, was originally published in the "Annals of Medicine" section of The New Yorker between 1947 and 1953.
The short story which gives its name to the title of the collection, Eleven Blue Men, was Berton Roueché's first medical story and it is arguably his most famous. It was originally published in The New Yorker in 1947 and was also included in Roueché's later collection of short stories The Medical Detectives.Eleven Blue Men formed the basis of the pilot of the television program Medical Investigation.
A man collapses in a Manhattan street and is taken to a doctor; he has abdominal cramping, retching, confusion and an alarming bluish hue to the skin. The doctor is understandably confused, and at first diagnoses carbon monoxide poisoning, which is known to cause cyanosis (a blue colour to the extremities due to oxygen deprivation). The hospital prepares for a mass poisoning due to a gas leak or other possible cause. They are right to do so, as another ten men turn up at the hospital with the same symptoms — thus the eponymous eleven blue men.
At this point, it becomes an epidemic, and the Department of Health is called in to investigate. The two investigators recognise the case as being similar to an extremely rare poisoning. Only ten recorded outbreaks have happened, and up until then the largest number of people affected in each one was four. This had, thus, become the worst such incident in history.
By the time they reach the hospital, one man has already died. The others have begun to recover, but the Department of Health is determined to find the underlying cause. They quickly rule out gas poisoning — one of the main symptoms is lacking, and it had taken too long to present. Instead, after questioning the men, they discover that the men all had become sick soon after eating the same food in the same place: oatmeal in a cafeteria.
This suggests food poisoning, but of an incredibly rare type that the doctors have never seen before. The men do not have the main symptoms of food poisoning: diarrhoea and vomiting. Also, the incubation period is too short for the most common bacterial poisonings. They also suspect recreational drugs, but the men deny this, saying that they drink quite heavily but nothing else. This brings them back to the oatmeal. Did it have something in it that could cause this reaction?
The other possibilities are a chemical contaminant. The men are given a blood test and the doctors also visit the cafeteria where they had eaten shortly before becoming ill. They meet someone from the Bureau of Food and Drugs, who finds multiple violations of the health code in the cafeteria — it is infested with vermin and has open sewage lines, amongst other things.
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