Chapter V: Pasteur (2)

“When we inject it under the skin--the virus may get lost in the body before it can travel to the brain--if I could only stick it right into a dog’s brain...!”

Roux listened to these dreamings of Pasteur, he listened bright-eyed to these fantastic imaginings.... Another man than Roux might have thought Pasteur completely crazy.... The brain of a dog or rabbit instead of a bottle of broth, indeed! What nonsense! But not to Roux!

“But why not put the virus right into a dog’s brain, master, I can trephine a dog--I can drill a little hole in his skull--without hurting him--without damaging his brain at all ... it would be easy ...” said Roux.

Pasteur shut Roux up, furiously. He was no doctor, and he did not know that surgeons can do this operation on human beings even, quite safely. “What! bore a hole right through a dog’s skull--why, you’d hurt the poor beast terribly ... you would damage his brain ... you would paralyze him.... No! I will not permit it!”

So near was Pasteur, by reason of his tender-heartedness, so close was he to failing completely in winning to the most marvelous of his gifts to men. He quailed before the stern experiment that his weird idea demanded. But Roux--the faithful, the now almost forgotten Roux--saved him by disobeying him.

For, a few days later when Pasteur left the laboratory to go to some meeting or other, Roux took a healthy dog, put him easily out of pain with a little chloroform, and bored a hole in the beast’s head and exposed his palpitating, living brain. Then up into a syringe he drew a little bit of the ground-up brain of a dog just dead with rabies: “This stuff must be swarming with those rabies microbes that are maybe too small for us to see,” he pondered; and through the hole in the sleeping dog’s skull went the needle of the syringe, and into the living brain Roux slowly, gently shot the deadly rabid stuff....

Next morning Roux told Pasteur about it----“What!” shouted Pasteur. “Where is the poor creature ... he must be dying ... paralyzed....”

But Roux was already down the stairs, and in an instant he was back, his operated dog prancing in ahead of him, jumping gayly against Pasteur, sniffing ’round among the old broth bottles under the laboratory benches. Then Pasteur realized Roux’s cleverness--and the new road of experiment that lay before him, and though he was not fond of dogs, his joy made him fuss over this one: “Good dog, excellent beast!” Pasteur said, and dreamed: “This beast will show that my idea will work....”

Sure enough, less than two weeks later the good creature began to howl mournful cries and tear up his bed and gnaw at his cage--and in a few days more he was dead, and this brute died, as you will see, so that thousands of mankind might live.

Now Pasteur and Roux and Chamberland had a sure way, that worked one hundred times out of one hundred, of giving rabies to their dogs and guinea-pigs and rabbits. “We cannot find the microbe--surely it must be too tiny for the strongest microscope to show us--there’s no way to grow it in flasks of soup ... but we can keep it alive--this deadly virus--in the brains of rabbits ... that is the only way to grow it,” you can hear Pasteur telling Roux and Chamberland.

Never was there a more fantastic experiment in all of microbe hunting, or in any science, for that matter; never was there a more unscientific feat of science than this struggling, by Pasteur and his boys, with a microbe they couldn’t see--a weird bug of whose existence they only knew by its invisible growth in the living brains and spinal cords of an endless succession of rabbits and guinea-pigs and dogs. Their only knowledge that there was such a thing as the microbe of rabies was the convulsive death of the rabbits they injected, and the fearful cries of their trephined dogs....

Then Pasteur and his assistants started on their outlandish--any wise man would say their impossible--adventure of taming this vicious virus that they could not see. There were little interruptions; Roux went with Thuillier to fight the cholera in Egypt and there, you will remember, Thuillier died; and Pasteur went out into the rural pig-sties of France to discover the microbe and find a vaccine against a disease that was just then murdering French swine. But Pasteur stopped getting entangled in those vulgar arguments which were so often to his discredit, and the three of them locked themselves in their laboratory in the Rue d’Ulm with their poor paralyzed and dangerous animals. They sweat through endless experiments.

Pasteur mounted guard over his young men and kept their backs bent over their benches as if they were some higher kind of galley slave. He watched their perilous experiments with one eye and kept the other on the glass door of the workroom, and when he saw some of Roux’s and Chamberland’s friends approaching, to ask them maybe to come out for a glass of beer on the terrace of a near-by café, the master would hurry out and tell the interlopers: “No. No! Not now! Cannot you see? They are busy--it is a most important experiment they are doing!”

Months--gray months went by during which it seemed to all of them that there was no possible way of weakening the invisible virus of rabies.... One hundred animals, alas, out of every hundred that they injected--died. You would think that Roux and Chamberland, still youngsters, would have been the indomitable ones, the never-say-die men of this desperate crew. But on the contrary!

“It’s no go, master,” said they, making limp waves of their hands toward the cages with their paralyzed beasts--toward the tangled jungles of useless tubes and bottles....

Then Pasteur’s eyebrows cocked at them, and his thinning gray hair seemed to stiffen: “Do the same experiment over again--no matter if it failed last time--it may look foolish to you, but the important thing is not to leave the subject!” Pasteur shouted, in a fury. So it was that this man scolded his monkish disciples and prodded them to do useless tests over and over and over--with no reasons, with complete lack of logic. With every fact against him Pasteur searched and tried and failed and tried again with that insane neglect of common sense that sometimes turns hopeless causes into victories.

Indeed, why wasn’t this setting out to tame the hydrophobia virus--why wasn’t it a nonsensical wild-goose chase? There was in all human history no single record of any man or beast getting better from this horrible malady, once the symptoms had declared themselves, once the mysterious messengers of evil had wormed their unseen way into the spinal cord and brain. It was this kind of murderous stuff that Pasteur and his men balanced on the tips of their knives, sucked up into their glass pipettes within an inch from the lips--stuff that was separated from their mouths by a thin little wisp of cotton....

Then, one exciting day, the first sweet music of encouragement came to these gropers in the dark--one of their dogs inoculated with the surely fatal stuff from a rabid rabbit’s brain--this dog came down with his weird barkings and portentous shiverings and slatherings--and then miraculously got completely better! Excitedly, a few weeks later, they shot this first of all recovered beasts with a deadly virus, directly into his brain they injected the wee murderers. The little wound on his head healed quickly--anxiously Pasteur waited for his doomful symptoms to come on him, but these signs never came. For months the dog romped about his cage. He was absolutely immune!

“Now we know it--we know we have a chance.... When a beast once has rabies and gets better from it, there will be no recurrence.... We must find a way to _tame_ the virus now,” said Pasteur to his men, who agreed, but were perfectly certain that there was no way to tame that virus.

But Pasteur began inventing experiments that no god would have attempted; his desk was strewn with hieroglyphic scrawls of them. And at eleven in the morning, when the records of the results of the day before had been carefully put down, he would call Roux and Chamberland, and to them he would read off some wild plan for groping after this unseen unreachable virus--some fantastic plan for getting his fingers on it _inside_ the body of a rabbit--to weaken it.

“Try this experiment to-day!” Pasteur would tell them.

“But that is technically impossible!” they protested.

“No matter--plan it any way you wish, provided you do it well,” Pasteur replied. (He was, those days, like old Ludwig van Beethoven writing unplayable horn parts for his symphonies--and then miraculously discovering hornblowers to play those parts.) For, one way or another, the ingenious Roux and Chamberland devised tricks to do those crazy experiments....

And at last they found a way of weakening the savage hydrophobia virus--by taking out a little section of the spinal cord of a rabbit dead of rabies, and hanging this bit of deadly stuff up to dry in a germ-proof bottle for fourteen days. This shriveled bit of nervous tissue that had once been so deadly they shot into the brains of healthy dogs--and those dogs did not die....

“The virus is dead--or better still very much weakened,” said Pasteur, jumping at the latter conclusion with no sense or reason. “Now we’ll try drying other pieces of virulent stuff for twelve days--ten days--eight days--six days, and see if we can’t just give our dogs a _little_ rabies ... then they ought to be immune....”

Savagely they fell to this long will o’ the wisp of an experiment. For fourteen days Pasteur walked up and down the bottle and microscope and cage-strewn unearthly workshop and grumbled and fretted and made scrawls in that everlasting notebook of his. The first day the dogs were dosed with the weakened--the almost extinct virus that had been dried for fourteen days; the second day they received a shot of the slightly stronger nerve stuff that had been thirteen days in its bottle; and so on until the fourteenth day--when each beast was injected with one-day-dried virus that would have surely killed a not-inoculated animal.

For weeks they waited--hair graying again--for signs of rabies in these animals, but none ever came. They were happy, these ghoulish fighters of death! Their clumsy terrible fourteen vaccinations had not hurt the dogs--but were they immune?

Pasteur dreaded it--if this failed all of these years of work had gone for nothing, and “I am getting old, old ...” you can hear him whispering to himself. But the test had to be made. Would the dogs stand an injection of the most deadly rabid virus--right into their brains--a business that killed an ordinary dog one hundred times out of one hundred?

Then one day Roux bored little holes through the skulls of two vaccinated dogs--and two not vaccinated ones: and into all four went a heavy dose of the most virulent virus....

One month later, Pasteur and his men, at the end of three years of work, knew that victory over hydrophobia was in their hands. For, while the two vaccinated dogs romped and sniffed about their cages with never a sign of anything ailing them--the two that had not received the fourteen protective doses of dried rabbit’s brain--these two had howled their last howls and died of rabies.

Now immediately--the life-saver in this man was always downing the mere searcher--Pasteur’s head buzzed with plans to wipe hydrophobia from the earth, he had a hundred foolish projects, and he walked in a brown world of thought, in a mist of plans that Roux and Chamberland, and not even Madame Pasteur could penetrate. It was 1884, and when Pasteur forgot their wedding anniversary, the long-suffering lady wrote to her daughter:

“Your father is absorbed in his thoughts, talks little, sleeps little, rises at dawn, and, in one word, continues the life I began with him this day thirty-five years ago.”

At first Pasteur thought of shooting his weakened rabies virus into all the dogs of France in one stupendous Napoleonic series of injections: “We must remember that no human being is ever attacked with rabies except after being bitten by a rabid dog.... Now if we wipe it out of dogs with our vaccine ...” he suggested to the famous veterinarian, Nocard, who laughed, and shook his head.

“There are more than a hundred thousand dogs and hounds and puppies in the city of Paris alone,” Nocard told him, “and more than two million, five hundred thousand dogs in all of France--and if each of these brutes had to get fourteen shots of your vaccine fourteen days in a row ... where would you get the men? Where would you get the time? Where the devil would you get the rabbits? Where would you get sick spinal cord enough to make one-thousandth enough vaccine?”

Then finally there dawned on Pasteur a simple way out of his trouble: “It’s not the dogs we must give our fourteen doses of vaccine,” he pondered, “it’s the human beings that have been bitten by mad dogs....”

“How easy!... After a person has been bitten by a mad dog, it is always weeks before the disease develops in him.... The virus has to crawl all the way from the bite to the brain.... While that is going on we can shoot in our fourteen doses ... and protect him!” and hurriedly Pasteur called Roux and Chamberland together, to try it on the dogs first.

They put mad dogs in cages with healthy ones, and the mad dogs bit the normal ones.

Roux injected virulent stuff from rabid rabbits into the brains of other healthy dogs.

Then they gave these beasts, certain to die if they were left alone--they shot the fourteen stronger and stronger doses of vaccine into them. It was an unheard-of triumph! For every one of these creatures lived--threw off perfectly, mysteriously, the attacks of their unseen assassins, and Pasteur--who had had a bitter experience with his anthrax inoculations--asked that all of his experiments be checked by a commission of the best medical men of France, and at the end of these severe experiments the commission announced:

“Once a dog is made immune with the gradually more virulent spinal cords of rabbits dead of rabies, nothing on earth can give him the disease.”

From all over the world came letters, urgent telegrams, from physicians, from poor fathers and mothers who were waiting terror-smitten for their children, mangled by mad dogs, to die--frantic messages poured in on Pasteur, begging him to send them his vaccine to use on threatened humans. Even the magnificent Emperor of Brazil condescended to write Pasteur, begging him....

And you may guess how Pasteur was worried! This was no affair like anthrax, where, if the vaccine was a little, just a shade too strong, a few sheep would die. Here a slip meant the lives of babies.... Never was any microbe hunter faced with a worse riddle. “Not a single one of all my dogs has ever died from the vaccine,” Pasteur pondered. “All of the bitten ones have been perfectly protected by it.... It must work the same way on humans--it _must_ ... but....”

And then sleep once more was not to be had by this poor searcher who had made a too wonderful discovery.... Horrid pictures of babies crying for the water their strangled throats would not let them drink--children killed by his own hands--such visions floated before him in the dark....

For a moment the actor, the maker of grand theatric gestures, rose in him again: “I am much inclined to begin on myself--inoculating myself with rabies, and then arresting the consequences; for I am beginning to feel very sure of my results,” he wrote to his old friend, Jules Vercel.

At last, mercifully, the worried Mrs. Meister from Meissengott in Alsace took the dreadful decision out of Pasteur’s unsure hands. This woman came crying into the laboratory, leading her nine-year-old boy, Joseph, gashed in fourteen places two days before by a mad dog. He was a pitifully whimpering, scared boy--hardly able to walk.

“Save my little boy--Mr. Pasteur,” this woman begged him.

Pasteur told the woman to come back at five in the evening, and meanwhile he went to see the two physicians, Vulpian and Grancher--admirers who had been in his laboratory, who had seen the perfect way in which Pasteur could guard dogs from rabies after they had been terribly bitten. That evening they went with him to see the boy, and when Vulpian saw the angry festering wounds he urged Pasteur to start his inoculations: “Go ahead,” said Vulpian, “if you do nothing it is almost sure that he will die.”

And that night of July 6, 1885, they made the first injection of the weakened microbes of hydrophobia into a human being. Then, day after day, the boy Meister went without a hitch through his fourteen injections--which were only slight pricks of the hypodermic needle into his skin.

And the boy went home to Alsace and had never a sign of that dreadful disease.

Then all fears left Pasteur--it was very much like the case of that first dog that Roux had injected years before, against the master’s wishes. So it was now with human beings; once little Meister came through unhurt, Pasteur shouted to the world that he was prepared to guard the people of the world from hydrophobia. This one case had completely chased his fears, his doubts--those vivid but not very deep-lying doubts of the artist that was in Louis Pasteur.

The tortured bitten people of the world began to pour into the laboratory of the miracle-man of the Rue d’Ulm. Research for a moment came to an end in the messy small suite of rooms, while Pasteur and Roux and Chamberland sorted out polyglot crowds of mangled ones, babbling in a score of tongues: “Pasteur--save us!”

And this man who was no physician--who used to say with proud irony: “I am only a chemist,”--this man of science who all his life had wrangled bitterly with doctors, answered these cries and saved them. He shot his complicated, illogical fourteen doses of partly weakened germs of rabies--unknown microbes of rabies--into them and sent these people healthy back to the four corners of the earth.

From Smolensk in Russia came nineteen peasants, moujiks who had been set upon by a mad wolf nineteen days before, and five of them were so terribly mangled they could not walk at all, and had to be taken to the Hotel Dieu. Strange figures in fur caps they came, saying: “Pasteur--Pasteur,” and this was the only word of French they knew.

Then Paris went mad--as only Paris can--with excited concern about these bitten Russians who must surely die--it was so long since they had been attacked--and the town talked of nothing else while Pasteur and his men started their injections. The chances of getting hydrophobia from the bites of mad wolves are eight out of ten: out of these nineteen Russians, fifteen were sure to die....

“Maybe,” said every one, “they will all die--it is more than two weeks since they were attacked, poor fellows; the malady must have a terrible start, they have no chance....” Such was the gabble of the Boulevards.

Perhaps, indeed, it was too late. Pasteur could not eat nor did he sleep at all. He took a terrible risk, and morning and night, twice as quickly as he had ever made the fourteen injections--twice a day to make up for lost time--he and his men shot the vaccine into the arms of the Russians.

And at last a great shout of pride went up for this man Pasteur, went up from the Parisians, and all of France and all the world raised a pæan of thanks to him--for the vaccine marvelously saved all but three of the doomed peasants. The moujiks returned to Russia and were welcomed with the kind of awe that greets the return of hopeless sick ones who have been healed at some miraculous shrine. And the Tsar of All the Russias sent Pasteur the diamond cross of Ste. Anne, and a hundred thousand francs to start the building of that house of microbe hunters in the Rue Dutot in Paris--that laboratory now called the Institut Pasteur. From all over the world--it was the kind of burst of generosity that only great disasters usually call out--from every country in the earth came money, piling up into millions of francs for the building of a laboratory in which Pasteur might have everything needed to track down other deadly microbes, to invent weapons against them....

The laboratory was built, but Pasteur’s own work was done; his triumph was too much for him; it was a kind of trigger, perhaps, that snapped the strain of forty years of never before heard-of ceaseless searching. He died in 1895 in a little house near the kennels where they now kept his rabid dogs, at Villeneuve l’Etang, just outside of Paris. His end was that of the devout Catholic, the mystic he had always been. In one hand he held a crucifix and in the other lay the hand of the most patient, obscure and important of his collaborators--Madame Pasteur. Around him, too, were Roux and Chamberland and those other searchers he had worn to tatters with his restless energy, those faithful ones he had abused, whom he had above all inspired; and these men who had risked their lives in the carrying out of his wild forays against death would now have died to save him, if they could.

That was the perfect end of this so human, so passionately imperfect hunter of microbes and saver of lives.

But there is another end of his career that I like to think of more--and that was the day, in 1892, of Pasteur’s seventieth birthday--when a medal was given to him at a great meeting held to honor him, at the Sorbonne in Paris. Lister was there, and many other famous men from other nations, and in tier upon tier, above these magnificoes who sat in the seats of honor, were the young men of France--the students of the Sorbonne and the colleges and the high schools. There was a great buzz of young voices--all at once a hush, as Pasteur limped up the aisle, leaning on the arm of the President of the French Republic. And then--it is the kind of business that is usually pulled off to welcome generals and that kind of hero who has directed the futile butchering of thousands of enemies--the band of the Republican Guard blared out into a triumphal march.

Lister, the prince of surgeons, rose from his seat and hugged Pasteur and the gray-bearded important men and the boys in the top galleries cried and shook the walls with the roar of their cheering. At last the old microbe hunter gave his speech--the voice of the fierce arguments was gone and his son had to speak it for him--and his last words were a hymn of hope, not so much for the saving of life as a kind of religious cry for a new way of life for men. It was to the students, to the boys of the high schools he was calling:

“... Do not let yourselves be tainted by a deprecating and barren skepticism, do not let yourselves be discouraged by the sadness of certain hours which pass over nations. Live in the serene peace of laboratories and libraries. Say to yourselves first: What have I done for my instruction? and, as you gradually advance, What have I done for my country? until the time comes when you may have the immense happiness of thinking that you have contributed in some way to the progress and good of humanity....”