Welcome To My World A World of Stories, Fun, and Laughter

I love writing and telling stories.  If I'd lived in the Middle Ages I’d probably have been a traveling story teller, earning my supper by sharing stories around the evening camp fires.  Actually I built this website because I want to share stories with you—at no cost or obligation.

Yes, believe it or not, I’d love to give you a weekly FREE story.  On my book page you’ll see the book, Fascinating Tales From Obscure History.  This is a collection of stories I had written in 2019 and collected into a book.  Every Saturday I send a story about obscure history, which hopefully will entertain and inform. Volume Two: Fascinating Tales From Obscure History is a collection of stories written in 2020.  The plan is for a new collection of stories to be published each year—or until I run out of stories or old age catches up to me.

The journey through my world begins with an adventure we’ll enjoy together.  You too can receive these weekly stories from obscure history by subscribing to my newsletter.  If you’re wondering what these stories are about, obscure history is history you probably never learned in school because for the most part it deals with little known events and actual people who make the past come alive.

So, let’s begin our shared journey by going to my subscription page where you can read a sample story, and subscribe to the Free newsletter.

 

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James R. Olson: About the Author

Before We Begin

An author biography usually lists all sorts of boring stuff like where I’ve lived and all the pertinent dates for the major events in life.  I’ll get to some of that stuff in a moment.  First I want to point out that I’ve had a really great life.  Oh, it hasn’t all been a bed of roses by any means.  I’ve had my share of wins and loses, joy and sorrow, laugher and tears.  But all told, if I could go back in time, I don’t think I’d change a single thing.

I was born in Kewanee, Illinois and really loved the small town life, which wasn’t destined to last very long.  My Dad was a professional soldier, and the family followed him to various duty stations.  I celebrated my 11th birthday in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, traveling by ship to Japan with my mother and two brothers. For two years we lived in Hamadera, Japan, a small fishing village on the Bay of Osaka. What an adventure for a young boy. Imagine the thrill of immersing in an alien culture; helping Japanese fishermen haul in their nets or playing baseball on the beach with kids who didn’t even speak the same language.

I spent three of my High School years living in Mainz, Germany along the historic Rhine River. Not only did I have an opportunity to savor the heritage and cuisine of the German people, I was able to travel extensively in France. It was particularly exciting for a teenager to experience the sights of Paris, and to bask in the sun on the splendor of isolated Riviera beaches.

I did my tour of duty in the Marine Corps, first as a tank driver and then as Battalion S-3 (training and planning) clerk with a “secret” clearance.  Once a Marine, always a Marine.  Along with a multitude of life lessons, the Corps taught me anyone could go beyond the physical and mental limits we often place upon ourselves.

I think I always wanted to write stories, but didn’t get serious until I got out of the Marines.  When life didn’t interfere, (I was the single parent of twin boys) I was always writing something or another.  Houghton Mifflin Company published my first novel, Ulzana, in 1973.  Since then I’ve published seven other novels.

“Fascinating Tales From Obscure History,” my first venture into book-length nonfiction, delves into the intriguing stories historians have let slip into obscurity. These are tales that look down the dusty corridors of time and bring to life the real people who carved their names in the annals of history.

Life is so much fun I’m still plugging away in my retirement, but now I write for the sheer pleasure of it.  Along with the short historical pieces for my weekly newsletter, I'm in the process of narrating all my titles, one by one, into audio books.  Currently The Vagabond Healer and Suffer The Children are available in audio editions (Click on the books below in the book section to select eBook, paperback, or audio).

My writing has won the Southwest Border Regional Library Association Award for historical fiction and the Council for Wisconsin Writers Best Novel of the Year. In retirement I've returned to the wonderful atmosphere of small-town America, this time in Texas—Pittsburg, Texas.

Books

Only the most recent four of my nine books are shown here. 

If you click on any of the four below you go directly to that book’s Amazon sales page.

If you click on Books, you'll go to my Amazon author's page where you can see all of my nine books.

Book of the Month SUFFER THE CHILDREN

Would you risk your life for a couple of kids you don’t even know?

Virtually overnight, Jonathon Wilson’s carefree bachelor world has been turned upside down. His sister is dead from a drug overdose that may or may not have been accidental, and he’s suddenly the guardian of a niece and nephew—who’ve been sexually and emotionally abused.

Fighting a Government Bureaucracy to keep the children out of the foster care system is only the beginning of his problems. His sister’s former drug dealer wants to ask the children some questions, and they aren’t likely to survive the interrogation. Now Jon must decide whether he is willing to die to protect two kids he didn’t even know existed two months ago.

Fascinating Tales From Obscure History

Injun

The Vagabond Healer

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If you enjoy history, you’ll love these weekly journeys into the vaults of obscure history. Every Saturday, I’ll be sending a new and different episode the history books have relegated to the dust bins of obscure history. Periodically I’ll also send an email announcing any new books I’ll be publishing, or when any of my books are on sale, or any other tidbits that may interest you.

If you’re like me, you get way too many unsolicited emails. I will never sell, rent, or lease my email list to anyone for any reason. Should you ever decide you don’t want to receive my emails, simply unsubscribe by the link at the bottom of each email, and we’ll part as friends. In the meantime, I look forward to sharing historical tidbits and having a bit of fun going down the corridors of obscure history with you.

The Savior of Humanity

Many of us will remember the year 2020 for the COVID-19 pandemic and the race to develop a vaccine—and for good reason.  Vaccines have been the first line of defense against viruses since 1798, when Edward Jenner created the world’s first vaccine—against small pox. Yet there is one scientist almost no one has ever heard of who developed vaccines that saved millions of lives—so many that Lord Joseph Lister, the great British pioneer of antiseptic surgery, called this forgotten man, "the savior of humanity”.
 
Waldemar Mordechai Haffkine (see, you didn’t recognize his name, did you?), born in 1860, was a Ukrainian Jew trained as a zoologist and a bacteriologist. Barred from a professorship because he was a Jew, Haffkine immigrated to Switzerland in 1888.  In 1889 he moved to Paris and the newly established Pasteur Institute where he took up the only available post of librarian. 
 
At the time, one of the five great cholera pandemics of the 19th century ravaged Asia and Europe. Haffkine focused his research on developing a cholera vaccine, and in 1892 produced an attenuated form of the bacterium. Risking his own life, Haffkine performed the first human test on himself and reported his findings to the Biological Society. Even though his discovery caused an enthusiastic stir in the press, it was not widely accepted by his senior colleagues, or by the official medical establishments. 
 
In 1893 Haffkine traveled to India, which he considered the best place to test his cholera vaccine.  However, from the moment of his arrival, Haffkine was met with skepticism and resistance from the British medical establishment and the Indian public.  How could he possibly have developed an effective vaccine?  He was a Russian Jew zoologist who was not even a doctor. 
 
Years of top-down medical programs by the British government had sowed distrust among the population, and to many the very concept of vaccination was still alien.  Haffkine decided the solution was to distance himself from the British and work with a team of Indian doctors and assistants. 
 
After an initial resistance people’s acceptance to the vaccine grew, and soon there were queues all day long in the slums of Calcutta.  Although Haffkine's work in the Calcutta slums placed him among a select group of scientists who pioneered the way disease was treated, Haffkine's name never really entered the public imagination, either in India or in Europe. 
 
Suddenly there was a more pressing problem in Bombay that would divert Haffkine from cholera for good.  Plague!  The world's third plague pandemic began in Yunnan, China in 1894, spreading down to British Hong Kong and from there by merchant ship to the bustling coastal metropolis of Bombay, where the first case was discovered in September 1896 at a grain merchant's quarters. 
 
In order to keep the port city open for business, the British government attempted to underplay the severity of the outbreak,. However it was impossible to keep the pandemic quiet when plague, with a mortality rate nearly twice that of cholera, tore through Bombay's tightly packed slums and the number of deaths soared. At the governor’s request Haffkine traveled to Bombay, where he set up his laboratory in one small room and a corridor.  With one clerk and three untrained assistants, he was tasked with developing the world's first plague vaccine. 
 
Haffkine worked tirelessly, successfully inoculating rabbits against an attack of plague. By January 1897 he was ready once again to test a fresh vaccine for a deadly disease on a human—himself.  Haffkine injected himself with 10cc of his preparation—a significantly higher dose than the 3cc he planned to use in wider testing. He experienced a severe fever but recovered after several days. 
 
At the end of January, a plague outbreak occurred at Bombay's Byculla House of Correction—a jail housing hundreds of inmates.  Haffkine inoculated 147 prisoners and left 172 untreated. There were 12 cases and six deaths among the untreated and just two cases and no deaths among the treated. 
 
Inside a year, hundreds of thousands of people had been inoculated using Haffkine's vaccine, saving untold numbers of lives. He was knighted by Queen Victoria, and in December 1901 he was appointed director-in-chief of the Plague Research Laboratory at Government House in Parel, Bombay. 
 
Then disaster struck. 
 
In March 1902, 19 people died from tetanus after being inoculated with Haffkine's vaccine. All the evidence appeared to point to a fatal contamination of bottle 53N—prepared 41 days earlier at the Parel lab. Unbelievably, the deaths of 19 people were threatening to undermine public trust in the vaccine at a time when at least 50,000 people were dying every week from plague. 
 
An Indian government commission was tasked with investigating, and it concluded that bottle 53N must have been contaminated in Haffkine's lab in Parel.  Of course as governments always do, the Indian government was quick to place all the blame on Haffkine.  He was fired as director of the plague lab and placed on leave from the Indian Civil Service. 
 
Further investigation determined Haffkine had been subjected to a grave injustice.  New documents revealed the assistant who opened bottle 53N dropped his forceps on the ground and failed to sterilize them properly before using them to remove the bottle's cork stopper.  Although Haffkine was vindicated, his reputation never recovered. 
 
Between 1897 and 1925, 26 million doses of Haffkine's anti-plague vaccine were sent out from Bombay. Tests of the vaccine's efficacy showed between a 50% and 85% reduction in mortality. But no figure could be put on the enormous number of lives his vaccine saved. 
 
It’s almost miraculous that Haffkine was able to develop a viable vaccine in a two-room lab with a very small team, yet somehow his achievement was allowed to fall into obscure history. When Waldemar Mordechai Haffkine died in 1930, aged 70, the world took little notice.  A short obituary circulated by the Jewish Telegraphic Agency noted his plague vaccine had saved countless lives throughout the world.  Waldemar Mordechai Haffkine developed vaccines to benefit mankind, not to accumulate fame.  Yet, since Lord Lister had declared Haffkine “the savior of humanity”, it would be nice if he were remembered by a few more of us.
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