America's Devastating First Plague and the Birth of Epidemiology

Yellow fever epidemic in Philadelphia, 1793.

The terror that is gripping Americans due to the coronavirus would be familiar to America’s founding generation. As Noah Webster, then the editor of New York City’s first daily newspaper, wrote to a friend in the fall of 1793, “The melancholy accounts received from you and others of the progress of a fatal disease…excite commiseration in every breast. An alarm is spread over the country.”

The disease was the yellow fever, a virus that attacked the liver and kidneys. This American plague, which got its name because its victims became jaundiced, swept through the nation’s biggest cities a few times between 1793 to 1798. The first outbreak occurred in August of 1793 in Philadelphia, which served as the nation’s capitol from 1790 to 1800. By the middle of that November, the yellow fever would decimate the city, wiping out 5,000 of its 50,000 residents and forcing President Washington and his cabinet to flee to neighboring Germantown. Cool fall temperatures then suddenly stopped this wave of the disease, which, as scientists would determine a century later, was transmitted by mosquitos.

About two years later, New York City was hit particularly hard. Its first recorded patient was Thomas Foster, who sought medical attention from Dr. Malachi Treat, the health officer at the city’s port, on July 6, 1795. As a colleague of Dr. Treat later wrote, Foster’s yellow skin was “covered with purple spots, his mind deranged, his tongue covered with a dry back sordes.” Foster died three days later, and Treat himself was soon gone. By mid-August, two New Yorkers a day were dying, and all afflicted patients were quarantined at Bellevue Hospital. As Webster’s New York neighbor, Dr. Elihu Smith, noted in his diary in September, “The whole city, is in a violent state of alarm on account of the fever. It is the subject of every conversation, at every hour, and in every company.” By late November when this outbreak petered out, 730 New Yorkers had died—the equivalent of about 200,000 today, as the city then had a population of about 40,000

That fall, Webster, who is best known to us today for his monumental dictionary of American English published in 1828, sprang into action. In late October, he published a circular in his paper, The American Minerva, addressed to the physicians in the cities most affected by the fever over the past three years—Philadelphia, New York, Baltimore, Norfolk and New Haven—which asked them to pass on whatever information that they had gathered from their own practices.

This circular served as the basis for the world’s first scientific survey. As Webster argued, given that “we want evidence of facts,” medical professionals needed to work together to understand this public health problem. About a year later, Webster published his findings in a 250-page book, A Collection of Papers on the Subject of the Bilious Fevers, prevalent in the United States for a Few Years Past, which featured eight chapters authored by experts scattered across the country such as Dr. Elihu Smith. Unfortunately, their accounts were short of hard data. Noting that poor immigrants constituted a large percentage of the dead, Smith, hypothesized that “the sudden intermingling of people of various and discordant habits [was] a circumstance favoring the production of the disease.” In contrast, Webster assumed that the cause had something to do with urban grime, arguing that Americans should “pay a double regard to the duties of order, temperance and cleanliness.” But given his empirical leanings, Webster acknowledged that he still needed to gather more data to reach a definitive conclusion.

Partisanship was as pervasive then as it is now, and Webster’s political opponents ridiculed his efforts. Webster’s paper supported the Federalist party of President Washington and Benjamin Franklin Bache, a grandson of Benjamin Franklin, who edited Philadelphia’s Republican paper, attacked his counterpart for self-serving behavior, writing that Webster merely sought for himself “the honor and the glory to triumph over a malady.” In a cruel irony, just three years later, Bache died from the disease at the age of twenty-nine.

In the summer of 1798, the fever came back with a vengeance. As Webster, who had recently moved to New Haven, wrote in his diary, “The disease assumes this year in Philadelphia and New York more of the characteristics of the plague, is contagious and fatal beyond what has been known in America for a century.” By the time frost in early November ended this round of devastation, another 3,400 had died in Philadelphia, 2,000 in New York and 200 in Boston. Included in these totals was New York’s Dr. Elihu Smith, who was just twenty-seven. The fever would return periodically throughout the 19th century, but never again with the same lethal intensity.

At the end of 1798, Webster published a follow-up book, A Brief History of Epidemic and Pestilential Diseases with the Principal Phenomena of the Physical World Which Precede Them and Accompany Them and Observations Deduced from the Facts Stated. The title was a misnomer, as this two-volume treatise clocked in at over 700 pages. Tracing the history of epidemics from biblical accounts to the present, Webster was again forced to conclude that he could not be sure what caused them, observing, “More materials are necessary to enable us to erect a theory of epidemics which shall deserve full confidence. Despite his lack of solid empirical findings, Webster had put the new field of public health on a scientific footing. He had set up a protocol that future medical professionals could follow, which involved gathering as much evidence as possible by pooling together the efforts of numerous experts on the front-lines. As Dr. William Osler, a giant of late 19th century medicine, observed, Webster’s book was “the most important medical work written in this country by a layman.”

As we now hunker down to wait out the current epidemic, we might keep in mind Webster’s observation that deadly diseases induce more than just terror and confusion. “The natural evils that surround us,” Webster wrote in his 1798 treatise, “[also] lay the foundation for the finest feelings of the human heart, compassion and benevolence.”

Puzzling skeleton helps reveal how ancient human relative grew up

 More than 200,000 years ago in what is now South Africa, a child, standing about three feet tall, somehow died before reaching adulthood. The young human relative’s body came to rest inside a deep, dark cave, alongside the remains of at least 14 others of its kind.

A lower right jawbone is part of a rare juvenile skeleton from the hominin species Homo naledi.

The remains went unnoticed and undisturbed until 2013, when spelunkers in South Africa’s Rising Star cave system came across hundreds of bone fragments and teeth from a newfound cousin to modern humans, a relative now called Homo naledi. Now, researchers poring over the cave’s fossils have pieced together the child’s partial skeleton—the first such juvenile H. naledi skeleton ever assembled.

Recovered from the cave system’s Dinaledi chamber, the individual—named DH7 (Dinaledi Hominin 7)—is thought to have died between eight and 15 years old. The newly described bones, unveiled today in the journal PLOS ONE, consist of a lower right jawbone and 16 fragments from the rest of the body. Such complete skeletons from young hominins other than modern humans and Neanderthals are exceedingly rare because the smaller, softer bones are less likely to fossilize.

A team of archaeologists from Germany and Egypt found a colossal 26-foot (7.9 meter) statue in a Cairo slum in the Souq Al-Khamis district, near the ruins of the ancient city of Heliopolis in Egypt on March 9, 2017. Experts believe that the 3,000-year old statue to be of pharaoh Ramses II, one of the country's most famous ancient rulers. It is being hailed as one of the most important discoveries ever by the Egyptian Antiquities Ministry.

The ancient Roman city was completely destroyed following Mount Vesuvius’ eruption in 79 A.D. and was buried under volcanic ash for years. Located near modern Naples, in the Campania region of Italy, the ruins of Pompeii were discovered by Italian architect Domenico Fontana in 1549, but it was excavated only in 1748 by Spanish engineer Rocque Joaquin de Alcubierre. The artifacts discovered from the site reveal a lot about the city life during the Pax Romana era and skeletal remains of the victims suggest they died of heat and asphyxiation. A UNESCO World Heritage Site, it is a major tourist attraction in Italy.

The skeleton could help researchers figure out how H. naledi grew up—and whether it matured more like modern humans, or more like our earlier ancestors.

“What was super exciting about this was that we were able to have proven associations with a single individual,” says study co-author Lee Berger, a paleoanthropologist at South Africa’s University of the Witswatersrand and National Geographic Society explorer-at-large. “We can look at dental development against body development and try to infer ... the way that Homo naledi developed.”

Finding juveniles is particularly significant, says University of Tuebingen paleoanthropologist Katerina Harvati-Papatheodorou, who was not involved with the new study. “Because fossil hominids did not necessarily follow the same growth patterns as modern humans, such information can also tell us how different or similar their growth would have been to our own or to other extinct species,” she says in an email.

The Dinaledi chamber has yielded more than 1,800 bone fragments and teeth of Homo naledi—providing unprecedented insight into the anatomy of an ancient human relative.

Most early human fossils are found as scattered, individual bones, not as sets that clearly belong to the same individual. Researchers have found only a handful of associated juvenile skeletons from the ancient hominins Australopithecus afarensis, Australopithecus sediba, and Homo erectus.

But the new Homo naledi skeleton stands out. The other early hominin species lived more than a million years ago, while H. naledi is much closer to our species in time. DH7 and the other fossils found with the skeleton were deposited between 226,000 and 335,000 years ago, just as signs of modern humans appear in Africa. But even though these two species may have coexisted, H. naledi had several physical features—such as its hips and shoulders—that more closely resembled ancient hominin cousins.

The find marks the latest discovery from the Dinaledi chamber, which Berger’s Rising Star Expedition has excavated with the support of the National Geographic Society since 2013. Just getting into the chamber is no easy feat. Team members have to squeeze their equipment—and themselves—through a passage less than eight inches wide.

DH7's left tibia, or shinbone, was found with its unfused ends, which suggests that the bone was entombed with itssurrounding soft tissue.

Enduring the tight space proved worthwhile. When study co-author Marina Elliott led excavations in the chamber in 2013 and 2014, she and her colleagues uncovered a treasure trove of bones. Scattered on the surface of the cave floor and buried within less than four carry-on suitcases’ worth of excavated dirt, the team found some 1,550 bones and teeth belonging to at least 15 Homo naledi individuals, ranging from infants to adults. To date, the chamber has yielded more than 1,800 fossils.

Elliott carefully documented where each bone fragment was found, so once the remains were removed from the cave, the team could work out which bones belonged to which individual—a challenge akin to solving 15 different puzzles when some pieces are lost and the rest are jumbled together.

By looking at the bones’ maturity and location within the cave, researchers began to piece together DH7—and right away, they knew the fossil was special. Some of DH7’s bones were articulated as they would have been in life, a sign that the bones had been buried surrounded by the original soft tissue. The remains were so well protected, DH7’s left shinbone still had both ends—a profoundly rare find.

In young hominins, including modern humans, the knobby ends of limb bones don’t properly fuse to the bones’ shafts until the individual is done growing. As a result, the ends of fossil juveniles’ limb bones are often scattered or missing altogether.

Researchers also tracked down DH7's left talus (bottom), or ankle bone, and its left navicular (top), a bone that helped connect the talus to other foot bones.

“This is an incredible find,” says lead study author Debra Bolter, a paleoanthropologist at Modesto Junior College in Modesto, California. “Most of the time, our stuff isn’t inside of a cave system and isn’t protected from all the other elements, like wind and rain and stampeding of African wildlife.”

Hominin youth

How old was DH7? For now, researchers aren’t sure. If H. naledi matured as fast as earlier hominins, such as H. erectus or A. sediba, then DH7 died between the ages of 8 and 11 years old. If H. naledi matured more slowly like modern humans and Neanderthals, however, DH7 would have died between 11 and 15 years old.

Researchers don’t yet know enough to distinguish between the two scenarios. H. naledi’s anatomy is a mosaic of features that resemble both earlier and later hominins. Its curved hand bones look a lot like far older and faster-developing species, but some of its other features, such as its feet and ankles, look strikingly like those of slower-growing modern humans.

What’s more, different parts of the H. naledi body may mature at different paces. A 2017 paper in Science showed that Neanderthal children matured in nearly the same way as modern humans—but their spines grew in a different pattern. “It was a surprise—we didn’t know that!” says Antonio Rosas González, the lead author of the 2017 study and a paleoanthropologist at Spain’s National Museum of Natural Sciences, who was not involved in the new study. “In the case [of H. naledi], we don’t know, and that would be a second step of the research.”

The remains of DH7 also include its left calcaneus, or heel bone.

H. naledi’s anatomical mishmash becomes all the more puzzling once researchers consider its brain. Despite H. naledi’s many humanlike features, its brain is only about two-fifths the size of ours, in line with far older and more primitive human ancestors.

“My first reaction would be that, since H. naledi is characterized by a much smaller brain size than Homo sapiens, which is closer to H. erectus or A. sediba, as well as a relatively small body size, that its maturation patterns would also be more similar to those species despite some similarities noted with H. sapiens,” Harvati-Papatheodorou says.

However, the brain organization of H. naledi appears to have been more complex than earlier hominins’, with more development in areas possibly linked to tool production. Other signs of H. naledi’s smarts have emerged from the Dinaledi chamber. Berger’s team has interpreted the fossil cache as a sign that H. naledi may have deliberately disposed of their dead, an idea that ignited intense debate when the team unveiled H. naledi in 2015.

Normally, small brain sizes correspond to faster development times. But with its humanlike features and complex brain, H. naledi may have been the exception to the trend. “You’re beginning to see that maybe Homo naledi is breaking all the rules,” Berger says.

Measuring the rate of H. naledi’s development requires figuring out how old DH7 was when the individual died. Luckily, the research team has exactly the material they’d need to figure out DH7’s exact age: some of its teeth.

As teeth develop, they accrete enamel by the day, leaving faint lines in the structure that resemble tree rings. By counting up these lines in some of DH7’s molars, researchers could potentially pin down, to the day, the age of DH7. But doing so comes with costs. Either researchers cut into and destroy part of DH7’s teeth, or they subject the teeth to powerful x-rays, which might destroy any preserved proteins that could reveal more about H. naledi’s relationship to other hominins, including us.

“We just have to be careful that what we do to get one piece doesn’t destroy an attempt to get any other kind of data,” Bolter says.

Superconductivity Has Been Discovered in Meteorites For The First Time

A fragment of the Mundrabilla meteorite.

Scientists have found naturally occurring superconducting materials in extraterrestrial objects for the first time, discovering superconductive grains embedded inside two distinct meteorites that crash-landed on Earth.

The discovery is just the latest to show that meteorites are much more than space debris that falls out of the sky. Recent investigations have turned up meteorite-borne deliveries of possible extraterrestrial proteins, minerals we've never encountered, and materials older than the Solar System itself. But we've never seen something quite like this before.

Superconductivity is a set of physical properties that ensures 'perfect' electrical conductivity in a material, meaning all electrical resistance inside the material vanishes, among other effects. This prized phenomenon is incredibly rare in natural materials that haven't been specially treated – or, at least, it's rare on Earth.

In the distant sky above, things could be very, very different, researchers say, with extreme environments in space creating exotic material phases not seen on Earth, via astronomical events that can unleash incredibly high temperatures and extremely high amounts of pressure.

Because of this, the thinking goes, meteorites could be good candidates for finding naturally formed superconducting materials forged in the strangeness of space. The only problem is, previous searches have never identified any such superconducting compounds. At least, not until now.

In a new study led by researchers from UC San Diego, scientists investigated fragments from 15 different meteorites, using a technique called magnetic field modulated microwave spectroscopy to detect traces of superconductivity inside the samples.

They got two hits: one, in an iron meteorite called Mundrabilla, one of the largest meteorites ever found, which was discovered in Australia in 1911; the other, a rare ureilite meteorite called GRA 95205, located in Antarctica a quarter-century ago.

According to the team's measurements, which also drew upon vibrating sample magnetometry (VSM) and energy dispersive X-ray spectroscopy (EDX) methods, both of these space rocks contain minute amounts of extraterrestrial superconductive grains.

"Naturally occurring superconductive materials are unusual, but they are particularly significant because these materials could be superconducting in extraterrestrial environments," says physicist and nanoscientist James Wampler.

"These measurements and analysis identified the likely phases as alloys of lead, indium, and tin."

It's a major find – and not only because it's a first in meteorites.

"Even the simplest superconducting mineral, lead, is only rarely found naturally in its native form, and, to our knowledge, there are no previous reports of natural lead samples superconducting," the authors explain in their paper.

"In fact, we are only aware of one previous report of superconductivity in natural materials, in the mineral covellite."

That said, the fact that these superconducting grains were discovered in two separate meteorites – and from such a small sampler overall of space rocks – means more of these superconducting phase materials are likely to exist in astronomical environments, and their superconducting properties could in turn have all manner of effects on their extraterrestrial surroundings.

"Superconducting particles within cold regions of space could have implications on the structure of stellar objects," the team writes.

"Specifically, superconducting particles could sustain microscopic current loops generated by transient fields and contribute to nearby magnetic fields."

Just how substantial these phenomena would end up being is anybody's guess, but there are lots of new questions to ask, and now's the time to get wondering.

A brief history of beards and pandemics

Albert Calmette, the French bacteriologist who developed a vaccination against tuberculosis for children with Camille Guerin, with a beard in 1891.

In the first years of the 20th century, New York City was in the throes of a tuberculosis hysteria. Although the disease had been an epidemic in the US since the mid-1800s, the rise of germ theory proved, for the first time, that tuberculosis was contagious. People panicked. As Frank M. Snowden recounted in his book Epidemics and Society, New Yorkers began demanding that public school students be tested for fever every morning. They avoided licking stamps at the post office. At the public’s urging, the New York Public Library began sending all of its returned books to the health department to be fumigated, and banks sterilized their coins.

But in the madness, no feature of American life fared worse than the beard. Health reformers began to zero in on whiskers as nesting places of disease. William H. Park, a doctor at the New York Board of Health, banned bearded men from working directly with milk supplies, announcing in 1901 that “there is real menace to the milk if the dairyman is bearded.” According to Park, the science was clear: “The beard, particularly when damp, may become an ideal germ carrier, and on an unclean man would have great facility for the transmission of disease.”

The idea that whiskers entrap germs, funneling disease toward anything they touch, has no factual basis.

Park’s central idea — that whiskers entrap germs, funneling disease toward anything they touch — has no factual basis. In terms of bacterial shedding, “there is no difference in bearded and non-bearded men,” said Carrie Kovarik, an associate professor of dermatology and medicine at the University of Pennsylvania. In her study of the phenomenon, Dr. Kovarik found that bearded people might actually carry fewer germs than their clean-shaven counterparts — perhaps because the “micro-trauma” that shaving inflicts on the skin opens up space for bacteria to congregate. But while Park’s lactic fearmongering might seem like the bygone panic of another era, the associations of beards with disease have proven strangely resilient.

In February, news outlets seized on a 2017 CDC infographic that showed how certain types of facial hair intrude on medical face masks. The CDC was not commenting on the cleanliness of beards, much less on their ability to spread Covid-19, but that didn’t stop the Daily Mail from exclaiming, “Could your facial hair put you at risk for the coronavirus?” These articles marked the resurgence of an old trope: In times of viral epidemic, beards become a scapegoat.

”Of course these anti-beard ideas are wrong, but the idea that beards are ‘dirty’ and harbor germs is a staple of 20th and 21st century thought, especially the early 20th century,” said Christopher Oldstone-Moore, a professor of history at Wright State University and a self-described beard historian.

When the New York Board of Health, in conjunction with the Milk Commission of the Medical Society of the County of New York, banned milkmen from growing beards in 1901, they were hewing to the new medical narrative on facial hair. In the 1890s, nurses had started shaving patients’ beards to bring down their risk of transmitting disease, pointing to studies suggesting that beards could accidentally entrap tuberculosis-laden spittle. In 1902, a syndicated newspaper editorial entitled “Shave The Microbe Infested Beard” made the hygienic case for abandoning facial hair, throwing out dubious claims like “doctors who wear beards report greater mortality among their patients than those who do not.” The editorial, which appeared in Rochester’s Democrat and Chronicle, the Dayton Daily News, and other newspapers, even pointed out that “most of the plague infected nations have worn beards,” only adding as an afterthought, “but that might be a coincidence.”

According to the piece, Americans were taking the anti-beard hysteria to heart. After an informal survey of Manhattan, the writer claimed that, unlike “some years ago when every third man on Broadway wore a beard,” he counted only 5 percent of men sporting beards. “It will not be long before we will be as whiskerless a race as in the days of Napoleon,” he concluded.

Anti-beard fears carried into the last major pandemic in American history: the 1918 Spanish flu. In 1916, just two years before the pandemic, doctors lambasted “the number of bacteria and noxious germs that may lurk in the Amazonian jungles of a well-whiskered face” for facilitating the spread of “measles, scarlet fever, diphtheria, tuberculosis, whooping cough.” By the time the flu pandemic struck the US in 1918, beards were declining in popularity, according to the Museum of Health Care.  

Clean shaven policemen with masks during the 1918 Spanish flu epidemic.

That drop-off can be traced to factors beyond just hygiene. Oldstone-Moore said that while germ theory was a factor in the fall of the American beard, it was probably “not a decisive one.” In his mind, the shifting masculinity that linked a clean-shaven face to “youthful vitality” and “professionalism” was the biggest driver of the new shaving vogue. Another important variable: the rise of Gillette’s first disposable razor, which let people shave their beards outside the confines of the barbershop. But the mounting health concerns, paired with the arrival of a true flu pandemic, meant that Americans couldn’t ditch their beards quickly enough.

This imagined link between beards and disease, however, is a surprisingly modern phenomenon. “Explanations for the Black Death, for example, involved ideas of poisoned water, corrupted air, the evil alignment of the planets, or simply the wrath of God,” said Oldstone-Moore. “Beards, at least, did not get any blame.” Before people knew germs existed, facial hair was not so easy to scapegoat.

In fact, prior to Robert Koch isolating Mycobacterium tuberculosis in 1882 and proving that germs facilitated the spread of tuberculosis, beards were enjoying a high watermark in the US and Europe. After a longtime association with political radicalism, beards were a hot commodity — both as a marker of white masculinity, as Sean Trainor notes in “The Racially Fraught History of the American Beard,” as well as a signal of health.

Before germ theory, people believed that disease spread through “fumes and dust,” and beards acted as a kind of air filter to block out illness. The Boston Medical and Surgical Journal first hypothesized as such in 1843, publishing a letter that urged doctors to tell their sick patients to grow beards. “We believe it to be a fact which cannot be controverted, that with those nations where the hair and beard are worn long, the people are more hardy and robust and much less subject to diseases, particularly of a pulmonary character, than those who shave,” the journal wrote.

Even in 1881, just a year before the discovery of the tuberculosis bacteria, The St. James’s Magazine insisted that the fastest way to ward off disease was to grow a beard. Borrowing from a study of French railway workers, the magazine noted that when 53 participants shaved their beards, in the following few years, 39 fell ill.

“Mustaches and other beards are lurking places of disease germs.”

But that logic would hardly survive the decade. The new skepticism for facial hair spread so rapidly that it reshaped industries well outside of medicine. In France, restaurants became convinced that clean-shaven waiters were less likely to contaminate the food they served, and a 1907 bill to ban mustaches led to a general strike among the Parisian server class. Waiters claimed that such a law “under a democratic republic is grotesque and humiliating.” Even the education sector felt reverberations of the panic. In April 1910, the Fresno Morning Republican announced that the California health board was requiring all male teachers to shave their facial hair, believing that “mustaches and other beards are lurking places of disease germs and hence are likely to cause disease to spread.”

We tend to forget just how profoundly epidemics can impact our culture. As WIRED noted recently, Covid-19 is well positioned to reshape our relationship to handshakes, in large part because warnings from public health authorities strike at such a primal level. King Henry VI’s ban on kissing during the Black Plague, for instance, explains why even today the British are less likely than their European counterparts to kiss on the cheek as a greeting.

Given that the CDC is not calling for regular people to shave their beards, a health-conscious shaving movement probably will not emerge during Covid-19 — unless, of course, Maluma starts one. The only people abandoning their beards in large numbers right now are first responders, doctors, and other medical professionals that have to make room for respiratory masks. But the panic over the CDC chart suggests that beards haven’t fully escaped their tuberculosis-era reputation — and in times of pandemic, side-eyeing heavily whiskered friends might be an unfortunate national pastime. 

KGB's secret Cold War weapon

Russian agents drugged British and American 'spies' with poisoned sherry so they could ransack their hotel rooms for secrets, documents reveal.

The KGB drugged suspected British and US spies with poisoned wine after inviting them to sample ‘experimental sherries’, files reveal.

Chemical nerve agent in the drinks caused victims to suffer memory loss before they vomited and passed out.

KGB thugs then burst into their hotel rooms and searched their unconscious bodies for Cold War secrets.

Files at Britain’s National Archives, stumbled upon by accident, recount a Cold War story from 1967 in detail.

British military attache Brigadier Tony Harper and his American counterpart Colonel Bill Spahr were seized at a winery in Moldova

The secret of a wine farm operating in the then Soviet republic of Moldova was uncovered when two victims woke up while being searched. These victims were British military attache Brigadier Tony Harper and his American counterpart, Colonel Bill Spahr.

They had diplomatic status but during their tour of the USSR the Kremlin thought they were gathering intelligence on Soviet troops.

So when the pair checked in to Hotel Kishinev in the capital of Moldova, the KGB was ready.

Like all foreigners at the time, the diplomats had to arrange their itinerary through the state travel agency Intourist.

They suspected nothing when the rep offered to take them to an experimental wine plant at 4pm that day to tour the factory and sample the wine.

The two men were determined to stay sober, the papers say, consuming no more than five sherry-sized glasses. But as they were leaving, they were brought a final wine in a bottle that arrived already open and which no one else drank from.

The wine was ‘dark red in colour, very thick and oily. The texture was heavy and the taste was non-existent’, according to the files.

As they left, the brigadier ‘began to feel a little befuddled’ and they could not remember the drive back to the hotel. They managed to lock themselves inside their room and were ‘violently sick’ before they collapsed by 6.45pm.

They then returned to Moscow where they were examined by an embassy doctor. Above is the former KGB headquarters in Moscow, Russia

Around 10.30pm ‘five or six men, including a militiaman in uniform, a man dressed in white overalls with a stethoscope and a photographer’ broke in.

The diplomats were held down ‘forcibly’ while the intruders tore open their shirts to get at the body belts in which they carried their notebooks. But the search was so forceful that both men regained consciousness.

They protested that they were diplomats but the thugs refused to believe them. They left around midnight after photographing all their documents and faking a police report claiming the two men had been drunk and rowdy.

The diplomats returned to Moscow where they were examined by an embassy doctor who concluded: ‘This seems to be a case of intoxication with a chemical agent with a sweet, pleasant taste, [mixed into] alcohol or water.’

Dr Juliette Desplat, of the National Archives, said: ‘Serendipity often occurs in the course of archival research. While looking for something entirely unconnected, I stumbled upon a file entitled “Incident at Kishinev involving British Military Attache” and I wasn’t disappointed.’

Both men survived the poisoning – Brigadier Harper died in 1997 at the age of 80 and Colonel Spahr in 2011 aged 89.