Chapter IX (2)

“The hen No. 2 has been given up to M. Colin to be used for any examination or experiment which he might like to try at Alfort.

“Signed: G. Colin, H. Bouley, C. Davaine, L. Pasteur, A. Vulpian.”

“This is a precious autograph, headed as it is by M. Colin’s signature!” gaily said Bouley. But Pasteur, pleased as he was with this conclusion, which put an end to all discussion on that particular point, was already turning his thoughts into another channel. The Academician who had joined the members of the Commission was showing him a number of the _Revue Scientifique_ which had appeared that morning, and which contained an article of much interest to Pasteur.

In October, 1877, Claude Bernard, staying for the last time at St. Julien, near Villefranche, had begun some experiments on fermentations. He had continued them on his return to Paris, alone, in the study which was above his laboratory at the Collège de France.

When Paul Bert, his favourite pupil, M. d’Arsonval, his curator, M. Dastre, a former pupil, and M. Armand Moreau, his friend, came to see him, he said to them in short, enigmatical sentences, with no comment or experimental demonstration, that he had done some good work during the vacation. “Pasteur will have to look out.... Pasteur has only seen one side of the question.... I make alcohol without cells.... There is no life without air....”

Bernard’s and Pasteur’s seats at the Academy of Sciences were next to each other, and they usually enjoyed interchanging ideas. Claude Bernard had come to the November and December sittings, but, with a reticence to which he had not accustomed Pasteur, he had made no allusion to his October experiments. In January, 1878, he became seriously ill; in his conversations with M. d’Arsonval, who was affectionately nursing him, Claude Bernard talked of his next lecture at the Museum, and said that he would discuss his ideas with Pasteur before handling the subject of fermentations. At the end of January M. d’Arsonval alluded to these incomplete revelations. “It is all in my head,” said Claude Bernard, “but I am too tired to explain it to you.” He made the same weary answer two or three days before his death. When he succumbed, on February 10, 1878, Paul Bert, M. d’Arsonval and M. Dastre thought it their duty to ascertain whether their master had left any notes relative to the work which embodied his last thoughts. M. d’Arsonval, after a few days’ search, discovered some notes, carefully hidden in a cabinet in Claude Bernard’s bedroom; they were all dated from the 1st to the 20th of October, 1877; of November and December there was no record. Had he then not continued his experiments during that period? Paul Bert thought that these notes did not represent a work, not even a sketch, but a sort of programme. “It was all condensed into a series of masterly conclusions,” said Paul Bert, “which evidenced certitude, but there were no means of discussing through which channel that certitude had come to his prudent and powerful mind.” What should be done with those notes? Claude Bernard’s three followers decided to publish them. “We must,” said Paul Bert, “while telling the conditions under which the manuscript was found, give it its character of incomplete notes, of confidences made to itself by a great mind seeking its way, and marking its road indiscriminately with facts and with hypotheses in order to arrive at that feeling of certainty which, in the mind of a man of genius, often precedes proof.” M. Berthelot, to whom the manuscript was brought, presented these notes to the readers of the _Revue Scientifique_. He pointed to their character, too abbreviated to conclude with a rigorous demonstration, but he explained that several friends and pupils of Claude Bernard had “thought that there would be some interest for Science in preserving the trace of the last subjects of thought, however incomplete, of that great mind.”

Pasteur, after the experiment at the Académie de Médecine, hurried back to his laboratory and read with avidity those last notes of Claude Bernard. Were they a precious find, explaining the secrets Claude Bernard had hinted at? “Should I,” said Pasteur, “have to defend my work, this time against that colleague and friend for whom I professed deep admiration, or should I come across unexpected revelations, weakening and discrediting the results I thought I had definitely established?”

His reading reassured him on that point, but saddened him on the other hand. Since Claude Bernard had neither desired nor even authorized the publication of those notes, why, said Pasteur, were they not accompanied by an experimental commentary? Thus Claude Bernard would have been credited with what was good in his MSS., and he would not have been held responsible for what was incomplete or defective.

“As for me, personally,” wrote Pasteur in the first pages of his _Critical Examination of a Posthumous Work of Claude Bernard on Fermentation_, “I found myself cruelly puzzled; had I the right to consider Claude Bernard’s MS. as the expression of his thought, and was I free to criticize it thoroughly?” The table of contents and headings of chapters in Claude Bernard’s incomplete MS. condemned Pasteur’s work on alcoholic fermentation. The non-existence of life without air; the ferment not originated by exterior germs; alcohol formed by a soluble ferment outside life ... such were Claude Bernard’s conclusions. “If Claude Bernard was convinced,” thought Pasteur, “that he held the key to the masterly conclusions with which he ended his manuscript, what could have been his motive in withholding it from me? I looked back upon the many marks of kindly affection which he had given me since I entered on a scientific career, and I came to the conclusion that the notes left by Bernard were but a programme of studies, that he had tackled the subject, and that, following in this a method habitual to him, he had, the better to discover the truth, formed the intention of trying experiments which might contradict my opinions and results.”

Pasteur, much perplexed, resolved to put the case before his colleagues, and did so two days later. He spoke of Bernard’s silence, his abstention from any allusion at their weekly meetings. “It seems to me almost impossible,” he said, “and I wonder that those who are publishing these notes have not perceived that it is a very delicate thing to take upon oneself, with no authorization from the author, the making public of private notebooks! Which of us would care to think it might be done to him!... Bernard must have put before himself that leading idea, that I was in the wrong on every point, and taken that method of preparing the subject he intended to study.” Such was also the opinion of those who remembered that Claude Bernard’s advice invariably was that every theory should be doubted at first and only trusted when found capable of resisting objections and attacks.

“If then, in the intimacy of conversation with his friends and the yet more intimate secret of notes put down on paper and carefully put away, Claude Bernard develops a plan of research with a view to judging of a theory--if he imagines experiments--he is resolved not to speak about it until those experiments have been clearly checked; we should therefore not take from his notes the most expressly formulated propositions without reminding ourselves that all that was but a project, and that he meant to go once again through the experiments he had already made.”

Pasteur declared himself ready to answer any one who would defend those experiments which he looked upon as doubtful, erroneous, or wrongly interpreted. “In the opposite case,” he said, “out of respect for Claude Bernard’s memory, I will repeat his experiments before discussing them.”

Some Academicians discoursed on these notes as on simple suggestions and advised Pasteur to continue his studies without allowing himself to be delayed by mere control experiments. Others considered these notes as the expression of Claude Bernard’s thought. “That opinion,” said Pasteur--man of sentiment as he was--“that opinion, however, does not explain the enigma of his silence towards me. But why should I look for that explanation elsewhere than in my intimate knowledge of his fine character? Was not his silence a new proof of his kindness, and one of the effects of our mutual esteem? Since he thought that he held in his hands a proof that the interpretation I had given to my experiments was fallacious, did he not simply wish to wait to inform me of it until the time when he thought himself ready for a definite statement? I prefer to attribute high motives to my friend’s actions, and, in my opinion, the surprise caused in me by his reserve towards the one colleague whom his work most interested should give way in my heart to feelings of pious gratitude. However, Bernard would have been the first to remind me that scientific truth soars above the proprieties of friendship, and that my duty lies in discussing views and opinions in my turn with full liberty.”

Pasteur having made this communication to the Academy on July 22, hastily ordered three glass houses, which he intended to take with him into the Jura, “where I possess,” he told his colleagues, “a vineyard occupying some thirty or forty square yards.”

Two observations expounded in a chapter of his _Studies on Beer_ tend to establish that yeast can only appear about the time when grapes ripen, and that it disappears in the winter only to show itself again at the end of the summer. Therefore “germs of yeast do not yet exist on green grapes.” “We are,” he added, “at an epoch in the year when, by reason of the lateness of vegetation due to a cold and rainy season, grapes are still in the green stage in the vineyards of Arbois. If I choose this moment to enclose some vines in almost hermetically closed glass houses, I shall have in October during the vintage some vines bearing ripe grapes without the exterior germs of wine yeast. Those grapes, crushed with precautions which will not allow of the introduction of yeast germs, will neither ferment nor produce wine. I shall give myself the pleasure of bringing some back to Paris, to present them to the Academy and to offer a few bunches to those of our colleagues who are still able to believe in the spontaneous generation of yeast.”

In the midst of the agitation caused by that posthumous work some said, or only insinuated, that if Pasteur was announcing new researches on the subject, it was because he felt that his work was threatened.

“I will not accept such an interpretation of my conduct,” he wrote to J. B. Dumas on August 4, 1878, at the very time when he was starting for the Jura; “I have clearly explained this in my notice of July 22, when I said I would make new experiments solely from respect to Bernard’s memory.”

As soon as Pasteur’s glass houses arrived, they were put up in the little vineyard he possessed, two kilometres from Arbois. While they were being put together, he examined whether the yeast germs were really absent from the bunches of green grapes; he had the satisfaction of seeing that it was so, and that the particular branches which were about to be placed under glass did not bear a trace of yeast germs. Still, fearing that the closing of the glass might be insufficient and that there might thus be a danger of germs, he took the precaution, “while leaving some bunches free, of wrapping a few on each plant with cotton wool previously heated to 150° C.”

He then returned to Paris and his studies on anthrax, whilst patiently waiting for the ripening of his grapes.

Besides M. Chamberland, Pasteur had enrolled M. Roux, the young man who was so desirous of taking part in the work at the laboratory. He and M. Chamberland were to settle down at Chartres in the middle of the summer. A recent student of the Alfort Veterinary School, M. Vinsot, joined them at his own request. M. Roux has told of those days in a paper on _Pasteur’s Medical Work_:

“Our guide was M. Boutet, who had unrivalled knowledge of the splenic fever country, and we sometimes met M. Toussaint, who was studying the same subject as we were. We have kept a pleasant memory of that campaign against charbon in the Chartres neighbourhood. Early in the morning, we would visit the sheepfolds scattered on that wide plateau of the Beauce, dazzling with the splendour of the August sunshine; then necropsies took place in M. Rabourdin’s knacker’s yard or in the farmyards. In the afternoon, we edited our experiment notebooks, wrote to Pasteur, and arranged for new experiments. The day was well filled, and how interesting and salutary was that bacteriology practised in the open air!

“On the days when Pasteur came to Chartres, we did not linger over our lunch at the Hôtel de France; we drove off to St. Germain, where M. Maunoury had kindly put his farm and flocks at our disposal. During the drive we talked of the week’s work and of what remained to be done.

“As soon as Pasteur left the carriage he hurried to the folds. Standing motionless by the gate, he would gaze at the lots which were being experimented upon, with a careful attention which nothing escaped; he would spend hours watching one sheep which seemed to him to be sickening. We had to remind him of the time and to point out to him that the towers of Chartres Cathedral were beginning to disappear in the falling darkness before we could prevail upon him to come away. He questioned farmers and their servants, giving much credit to the opinions of shepherds, who on account of their solitary life, give their whole attention to their flocks and often become sagacious observers.”

When again at Arbois, on September 17, Pasteur began to write to the Minister of Agriculture a note on the practical ideas suggested by this first campaign. A few sheep, bought near Chartres and gathered in a fold, had received, amongst the armfuls of forage offered them, a few anthrax spores. Nothing had been easier than to bring these from the laboratory, in a liquid culture of bacteria, and to scatter them on the field where the little flock grazed. The first meals did not give good scientific results, death was not easily provoked. But when the experimental menu was completed by prickly plants, likely to wound the sheep on their tongue or in their pharynx, such, for instance, as thistles or ears of barley, the mortality began. It was perhaps not as considerable as might have been wished for demonstration purposes, but nevertheless it was sufficient to explain how charbon could declare itself, for necropsy showed the characteristic lesions of the so-called spontaneous splenic fever. It was also to be concluded therefrom that the evil begins in the mouth, or at the back of the throat, supervening on meals of infected food, alone or mixed with prickly plants likely to cause abrasion.

It was therefore necessary, in a department like that of Eure et Loir, which must be full of anthrax germs,--particularly on the surface of the graves containing carcases of animals which had fallen victims to the disease,--that sheep farmers should keep from the food of their animals plants such as thistles, ears of barley, and sharp pieces of straw; for the least scratch, usually harmless to sheep, became dangerous through the possible introduction of the germs of the disease.

“It would also be necessary” wrote Pasteur, “to avoid all probable diffusion of charbon germs through the carcases of animals dying of that disease, for it is likely that the department of Eure et Loir contains those germs in greater quantities than the other departments; splenic fever having long been established there, it always goes on, dead animals not being disposed of so as to destroy all germs of ulterior contagion.”

After finishing this report, Pasteur went to his little vineyard on the Besançon road, where he met with a disappointment; his precious grapes had not ripened, all the strength of the plant seemed to have gone to the wood and leaves. But the grapes had their turn at the end of September and in October, those bunches that were swathed in cotton wool as well as those which had remained free under the glass; there was a great difference of colour between them, the former being very pale. Pasteur placed grapes from the two series in distinct tubes. On October 10, he compared the grapes of the glass houses, free or swathed, with the neighbouring open-air grapes. “The result was beyond my expectations; the tubes of open-air grapes fermented with grape yeast after a thirty-six or forty-eight hours’ sojourn in a stove from 25° C. to 30° C.; not one, on the contrary, of the numerous tubes of grapes swathed in cotton wool entered into alcoholic fermentation, neither did any of the tubes containing grapes ripened free under glass. It was the experiment described in my _Studies on Beer_. On the following days I repeated these experiments with the same results.” He went on to another experiment. He cut some of the swathed bunches and hung them to the vines grown in the open air, thinking that those bunches--exactly similar to those which he had found incapable of fermentation--would thus get covered with the germs of alcoholic ferments, as did the bunches grown in the open air and their wood. After that, the bunches taken from under the glass and submitted to the usual régime would ferment under the influence of the germs which they would receive as well as the others; this was exactly what happened.

The difficulty now was to bring to the Académie des Sciences these branches bearing swathed bunches of grapes; in order to avoid the least contact to the grapes, these vine plants, as precious as the rarest orchids, had to be held upright all the way from Arbois to Paris. Pasteur came back to Paris in a coupé carriage on the express train, accompanied by his wife and daughter, who took it in turns to carry the vines. At last, they arrived safely at the Ecole Normale, and from the Ecole Normale to the Institute, and Pasteur had the pleasure of bringing his grapes to his colleagues as he had brought his hens. “If you crush them while in contact with pure air,” he said, “I defy you to see them ferment.” A long discussion then ensued with M. Berthelot, which was prolonged until February, 1879.

“It is a characteristic of exalted minds,” wrote M. Roux, “to put passion into ideas.... For Pasteur, the alcoholic fermentation was correlative with the life of the ferment; for Bernard and M. Berthelot, it was a chemical action like any other, and could be accomplished without the participation of living cells.” “In alcoholic fermentation,” said M. Berthelot, “a soluble alcoholic ferment may be produced, which perhaps consumes itself as its production goes on.”

M. Roux had seen Pasteur try to “extract the soluble alcoholic ferment from yeast cells by crushing them in a mortar, by freezing them until they burst, or by putting them into concentrated saline solutions, in order to force by osmose the succus to leave its envelope.” Pasteur confessed that his efforts were vain. In a communication to the Académie des Sciences on December 30, 1878, he said--

“It ever is an enigma to me that it should be believed that the discovery of soluble ferments in fermentations properly so called, or of the formation of alcohol by means of sugar, independently of cells would hamper me. It is true--I own it without hesitation, and I am ready to explain myself more lengthily if desired--that at present I neither see the necessity for the existence of those ferments, nor the usefulness of their action in this order of fermentations. Why should actions of _diastase_, which are but phenomena of hydration, be confused with those of organized ferments, or vice versâ? But I do not see that the presence of those soluble substances, if it were ascertained, could change in any way the conclusions drawn from my labours, and even less so if alcohol were formed by electrolysis.

“They agree with me who admit:

“Firstly. That fermentations, properly so called, offer as an essential condition the presence of microscopic organisms.

“Secondly. That those organisms have not a spontaneous origin.

“Thirdly. That the life of every organism which can exist away from free oxygen is suddenly concomitant with acts of fermentation; and that it is so with every cell which continues to produce chemical action without the contact of oxygen.”

When Pasteur related this discussion, and formed of it an appendix to his book, _Critical Examination of a Posthumous Work of Claude Bernard on Fermentations_, his painful feelings in opposing a friend who was no more were so clearly evidenced that Sainte Claire Deville wrote to him (June 9, 1879): “My dear Pasteur, I read a few passages of your new book yesterday to a small party of professors and _savants_. We all were much moved by the expressions with which you praise our dear Bernard, and by your feelings of friendship and pure fraternity.”

Sainte Claire Deville often spoke of his admiration for Pasteur’s precision of thought, his forcible speech, the clearness of his writings. As for J. B. Dumas, he called the attention of his colleagues at the Académie Française to certain pages of that _Critical Examination_. Though unaccustomed to those particular subjects, they could not but be struck by the sagacity and ingenuity of Pasteur’s researches, and by the eloquence inspired by his genius. A propos of those ferment germs, which turn grape juice into wine, and from which he had preserved his swathed bunches, Pasteur wrote--

“What meditations are induced by those results! It is impossible not to observe that, the further we penetrate into the experimental study of germs, the more we perceive sudden lights and clear ideas on the knowledge of the causes of contagious diseases! Is it not worthy of attention that, in that Arbois vineyard (and it would be true of the million _hectares_ of vineyards of all the countries in the world), there should not have been, at the time when I made the aforesaid experiments, one single particle of earth which would not have been capable of provoking fermentation by a grape yeast, and that, on the other hand, the earth of the glass houses I have mentioned should have been powerless to fulfil that office? And why? Because, at a given moment, I covered that earth with some glass. The death, if I may so express it, of a bunch of grapes thrown at that time on any vineyard, would infallibly have occurred through the _saccharomyces_ parasites of which I speak; that kind of death would have been impossible, on the contrary, on the little space enclosed by my glass houses. Those few cubic yards of air, those few square yards of soil, were there, in the midst of a universal possible contagion, and they were safe from it.”

And suddenly looking beyond those questions of yeast and vintage, towards the germs of disease and of death: “Is it not permissible to believe, by analogy, that a day will come when easily applied preventive measures will arrest those scourges which suddenly desolate and terrify populations; such as the fearful disease (yellow fever) which has recently invaded Senegal and the valley of the Mississippi, or that other (bubonic plague), yet more terrible perhaps, which has ravaged the banks of the Volga.”

Pasteur, with his quick answers, his tenacious refutations, was looked upon as a great fighter by his colleagues at the Academy, but in the laboratory, while seeking Claude Bernard’s soluble ferment, he tackled subjects from which he drew conclusions which were amazing to physicians.

A worker in the laboratory had had a series of furuncles. Pasteur, whose proverb was “Seek the microbe,” asked himself whether the pus of furuncles might not have an organism, which, carried to and fro,--for it may be said that a furuncle never comes alone--would explain the centre of inflammation and the recurrence of the furuncles. After abstracting--with the usual purity precautions--some pus from three successive furuncles, he found in some sterilized broth a microbe, formed of little rounded specks which clustered to the sides of the culture vessel. The same was observed on a man whom Dr. Maurice Raynaud, interested in those researches on furuncles, had sent to the laboratory, and afterwards on a female patient of the Lariboisière Hospital, whose back was covered with furuncles. Later on, Pasteur, taken by Dr. Lannelongue to the Trousseau Hospital, where a little girl was about to be operated on for that disease of the bones and marrow called _osteomyelitis_, gathered a few drops of pus from the inside and the outside of the bone, and again found clusters of microbes. Sown into a culture liquid, this microbe seemed so identical with the furuncle organism that “it might be affirmed at first sight,” said Pasteur, “that osteomyelitis is the furuncle of bones.”

The hospital now took as much place in Pasteur’s life as the laboratory. “Chamberland and I assisted him in those studies,” writes M. Roux. “It was to the Hôpital Cochin or to the Maternité that we went most frequently, taking our culture tubes and sterilized pipets into the wards or operating theatres. No one knows what feelings of repulsion Pasteur had to overcome before visiting patients and witnessing post-mortem examinations. His sensibility was extreme, and he suffered morally and physically from the pains of others; the cut of the bistoury opening an abscess made him wince as if he himself had received it. The sight of corpses, the sad business of necropsies, caused him real disgust; we have often seen him go home ill from those operating theatres. But his love of science, his desire for truth were the stronger; he returned the next day.”

He was highly interested in the study of puerperal fever, which was still enveloped in profound darkness. Might not the application of his theories to the progress of surgery be realized in obstetrics? Could not those epidemics be arrested which passed like scourges over lying-in hospitals? It was still remembered with horror how, in the Paris Maternity Hospital, between April 1 and May 10, 1856, 64 fatalities had taken place out of 347 confinements. The hospital had to be closed, and the survivors took refuge at the Lariboisière Hospital, where they nearly all succumbed, pursued, it was thought, by the epidemic.

Dr. Tarnier, a student residing at the Maternité during that disastrous time, related afterwards how the ignorance of the causes of puerperal fever was such that he was sometimes called away, by one of his chiefs, from some post-mortem business, to assist in the maternity wards; nobody being struck by the thought of the infection which might thus be carried from the theatre to the bed of the patient.

The discussion which arose in 1858 at the Académie de Médecine lasted four months, and hypotheses of all kinds were brought forward. Trousseau alone showed some prescience of the future by noticing an analogy between infectious surgical accidents and infectious puerperal accidents; the idea of a ferment even occurred to him. Years passed; women of the lower classes looked upon the Maternité as the vestibule of death. In 1864, 310 deaths occurred out of 1,350 confinement cases; in 1865, the hospital had to be closed. Works of cleansing and improvements gave rise to a hope that the “epidemic genius” might be driven away. “But, at the very beginning of 1866,” wrote Dr. Trélat, then surgeon-in-chief at the Maternité, “the sanitary condition seemed perturbed, the mortality rose in January, and in February we were overwhelmed.” Twenty-eight deaths had occurred out of 103 cases.

Trélat enumerated various causes, bad ventilation, neighbouring wards, etc., but where was the origin of the evil?

“Under the influence of causes which escape us,” wrote M. Léon Le Fort about that time, “puerperal fever develops in a recently delivered woman; she becomes a centre of infection, and, if that infection is freely exercised, the epidemic is constituted.”

Tarnier, who took Trélat’s place at the Maternité, in 1867, had been for eleven years so convinced of the infectious nature of puerperal fever that he thought but of arresting the evil by every possible means of defence, the first of which seemed to him isolation of the patients.

In 1874, Dr. Budin, then walking the hospitals, had noted in Edinburgh the improvement due to antisepsis, thanks to Lister. Three or four years later, in 1877 and 1878, after having seen that, in the various maternity hospitals of Holland, Germany, Austria, Russia and Denmark, antisepsis was practised with success, he brought his impressions with him to Paris. Tarnier hastened to employ carbolic acid at the Maternité with excellent results, and his assistant, M. Bar, tried sublimate. While that new period of victory over fatal cases was beginning, Pasteur came to the Académie de Médecine, having found, in certain puerperal infections, a microbe in the shape of a chain or chaplet, which lent itself very well to culture.

“Pasteur,” wrote M. Roux, “does not hesitate to declare that that microscopic organism is the most frequent cause of infection in recently delivered women. One day, in a discussion on puerperal fever at the Academy, one of his most weighty colleagues was eloquently enlarging upon the causes of epidemics in lying-in hospitals; Pasteur interrupted him from his place. ‘None of those things cause the epidemic; it is the nursing and medical staff who carry the microbe from an infected woman to a healthy one.’ And as the orator replied that he feared that microbe would never be found, Pasteur went to the blackboard and drew a diagram of the chain-like organism, saying: ‘There, that is what it is like!’ His conviction was so deep that he could not help expressing it forcibly. It would be impossible now to picture the state of surprise and stupefaction into which he would send the students and doctors in hospitals, when, with an assurance and simplicity almost disconcerting in a man who was entering a lying-in ward for the first time, he criticized the appliances, and declared that all the linen should be put into a sterilizing stove.”

Pasteur was not satisfied with offering advice and criticism, making for himself irreconcilable enemies amongst those who were more desirous of personal distinction than of the progress of Science. In order the better to convince those who still doubted, he affirmed that, in a badly infected patient--what he usually and sorrowfully called an _invaded_ patient--he could bring the microbe into evidence by a simple pin prick on the finger tip of the unhappy woman doomed to die the next day.

“And he did so,” writes M. Roux. “In spite of the tyranny of medical education which weighed down the public mind, some students were attracted, and came to the laboratory to examine more closely those matters, which allowed of such precise diagnosis and such confident prognosis.”

What struggles, what efforts, were necessary before it could be instilled into every mind that a constant watch must be kept in the presence of those invisible foes, ready to invade the human body through the least scratch--that surgeons, dressers and nurses may become causes of infection and propagators of death through forgetfulness! and before the theory of germs and the all powerfulness of microbes could be put under a full light à propos of that discussion on puerperal fever!

But Pasteur was supported and inspired during that period, perhaps the most fruitful of his existence, by the prescience that those notions meant the salvation of human lives, and that mothers need no longer be torn by death from the cradle of their new-born infants.

“I shall force them to see; they will have to see!” he repeated with a holy wrath against doctors who continued to talk, from their study or at their clubs, with some scepticism, of those newly discovered little creatures, of those ultra-microscopic parasites, trying to moderate enthusiasm and even confidence.

An experimental fact which occurred about that time was followed with interest, not only by the Académie des Sciences, but by the general public, whose attention was beginning to be awakened. A professor at the Nancy Faculty, M. Feltz, had announced to the Académie des Sciences in March, 1879, that, in the blood abstracted from a woman, who had died at the Nancy Hospital of puerperal fever, he had found motionless filaments, simple or articulated, transparent, straight or curved, which belonged, he said, to the genus _leptothrix_. Pasteur, who in his studies on puerperal fever had seen nothing of the kind, wrote to Dr. Feltz, asking him to send him a few drops of that infected blood. After receiving and examining the sample, Pasteur hastened to inform M. Feltz that that leptothrix was no other than the bacillus anthracis. M. Feltz, much surprised and perplexed, declared himself ready to own his error and to proclaim it if he were convinced by examining blood infected by charbon, and which, he said, he should collect wherever he could find it. Pasteur desired to save him that trouble, and offered to send him three little guinea-pigs alive, but inoculated, the one with the deceased woman’s blood, the other with the bacteridia of charbon-infected blood from Chartres, the third with some charbon-infected blood from a Jura cow.

The three rodents were inoculated on May 12, at three o’clock in the afternoon, and arrived, living, at Nancy, on the morning of the thirteenth. They died on the fourteenth, in the laboratory of M. Feltz, who was thus able to observe them with particular attention until their death.

“After carefully examining the blood of the three animals after their death, I was unable,” said M. Feltz, “to detect the least difference; not only the blood, but the internal organs, and notably the spleen, were affected in the same manner.”... “It is a certainty to my mind,” he wrote to Pasteur, “that the contaminating agent has been the same in the three cases, and that it was the bacteridium of what you call anthrax.”

There was therefore no such thing as a leptothrix puerperalis. And it was at a distance, without having seen the patient, that Pasteur said: “That woman died of charbon.” With an honourable straightforwardness, M. Feltz wrote to the Académie des Sciences relating the facts.

“It is doubly regrettable,” he concluded, “that I should not have known charbon already last year, for, on the one hand, I might have diagnosed the redoubtable complication presented by the case, and, on the other hand, sought for the mode of contamination, which at present escapes me almost completely.” All he had been able to find was that the woman, a charwoman, lived in a little room near a stable belonging to a horse dealer. Many animals came there; the stable might have contained diseased ones; M. Feltz had been unable to ascertain the fact. “I must end,” he added, “with thanks to M. Pasteur for the great kindness he has shown me during my intercourse with him. Thanks to him, I was able to convince myself of the identity between the bacillus anthracis and the bacteridium found in the blood of a woman who presented all the symptoms of grave puerperal fever.”

At the time when that convincing episode was taking place, other experiments equally precise were being undertaken concerning splenic fever. The question was to discover whether it would be possible to find germs of charbon in the earth of the fields which had been contaminated purposely, fourteen months before, by pouring culture liquids over it. It seemed beyond all probability that those germs might be withdrawn and isolated from the innumerable other microbes contained in the soil. It was done, however; 500 grammes of earth were mixed with water, and infinitesimal particles of it isolated. The spore of the bacillus anthracis resists a temperature of 80° C. or 90° C., which would kill any other microbe; those particles of earth were accordingly raised to that degree of heat and then injected into some guinea-pigs, several of which died of splenic fever. It was therefore evident that flocks were exposed to infection merely by grazing over certain fields in that land of the Beauce. For it was sufficient that some infected blood should have remained on the ground, for germs of bacteridia to be found there, perhaps years later. How often was such blood spilt as a dead animal was being taken to the knacker’s yard or buried on the spot! Millions of bacteridia, thus scattered on and below the surface of the soil, produced their spores, seeds of death ready to germinate.

And yet negative facts were being opposed to these positive facts, and the theory of spontaneity invoked! “It is with deep sorrow,” said Pasteur at the Académie de Médecine on November 11, 1873, “that I so frequently find myself obliged to answer thoughtless contradiction; it also grieves me much to see that the medical Press speaks of these discussions in apparent ignorance of the true principles of experimental method....

“That aimlessness of criticism seems explicable to me, however, by this circumstance--that Medicine and Surgery are, I think, going through a crisis, a transition. There are two opposite currents, that of the old and that of the new-born doctrine; the first, still followed by innumerable partisans, rests on the belief in the spontaneity of transmissible diseases; the second is the theory of germs, of the living contagium with all its legitimate consequences....”

The better to point out that difference between epochs, Pasteur respectfully advised M. Bouillaud, who was taking part in the discussion, to read over Littré’s _Medicine and Physicians_, and to compare with present ideas the chapter on epidemics written in 1836, four years after the cholera which had spread terror over Paris and over France. “Poisons and venoms die out on the spot after working the evil which is special to them,” wrote Littré, “and are not reproduced in the body of the victim, but virus and miasmata are reproduced and propagated. Nothing is more obscure to physiologists than those mysterious combinations of organic elements; but there lies the dark room of sickness and of death which we must try to open.” “Among epidemic diseases,” said Littré in another passage equally noted by Pasteur, “some occupy the world and decimate nearly all parts of it, others are limited to more or less wide areas. The origin of the latter may be sought either in local circumstances of dampness, of marshy ground, of decomposing animal or vegetable matter, or in the changes which take place in men’s mode of life.”

“If I had to defend the novelty of the ideas introduced into medicine by my labours of the last twenty years,” wrote Pasteur from Arbois in September, 1879, “I should invoke the significant spirit of Littré’s words. Such was then the state of Science in 1836, and those ideas on the etiology of great epidemics were those of one of the most advanced and penetrating minds of the time. I would observe, contrarily to Littré’s opinion, that nothing proves the spontaneity of great epidemics! As we have lately seen the phylloxera, imported from America, invade Europe, so it might be that the causes of great pests were originated, unknowingly to stricken countries, in other countries which had had fortuitous contact with the latter. Imagine a microscopic being, inhabiting some part of Africa and existing on plants, on animals, or even on men, and capable of communicating a disease to the white race; if brought to Europe by some fortuitous circumstance, it may become the occasion of an epidemic....”

And, writing later, about the same passage: “Nowadays, if an article had to be written on the same subject, it would certainly be the idea of living ferments and microscopic beings and germs which would be mentioned and discussed as a cause. That is the great progress,” added Pasteur with legitimate pride, “in which my labours have had so large a share. But it is characteristic of Science and Progress that they go on opening new fields to our vision; the scientist, who is exploring the unknown, resembles the traveller who perceives further and higher summits as he reaches greater altitudes. In these days, more infectious diseases, more microscopic beings appear to the mind as things to be discovered, the discovery of which will render a wonderful account of pathological conditions and of their means of action and propagation, of self-multiplication within and destruction of the organism. The point of view is very different from Littré’s!!”

On his return to Paris, Pasteur, his mind overflowing with ideas, had felt himself impelled to speak again, to fight once more the fallacious theory of the spontaneity of transmissible diseases. He foresaw the triumph of the germ theory arising from the ruin of the old doctrines--at the price, it is true, of many efforts, many struggles, but those were of little consequence to him.

The power of his mind, the radiating gifts that he possessed, were such that his own people were more and more interested in the laboratory, every one trying day by day to penetrate further into Pasteur’s thoughts. His family circle had widened; his son and his daughter had married, and the two new-comers had soon been initiated into past results and recent experiments. He had, in his childhood and youth, been passionately loved by his parents and sisters, and now, in his middle age, his tenderness towards his wife and children was eagerly repaid by the love they bore him. He made happiness around him whilst he gave glory to France.