Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 25.djvu/251

Rh give pébrine or flachery. He became able to graduate the intensity of the disease, and make it appear at any day and almost at any hour." He found the means of preventing the disorders, and "restored its wealth to the desolated silk district." The cost of this precious result was a paralysis of the left side, from which he has never fully recovered.

As early as 1860 M. Pasteur expressed the hope that he might "be able to pursue his investigations far enough to prepare the way for a more profound study of the origin of diseases." Reviewing, at the conclusion of his "Studies on Beer," the principles which had directed his labors for twenty years, he wrote that the etiology of contagious diseases was, perhaps, on the eve of receiving an unexpected light. Robert Boyle had said that thorough understanding of the nature of fermentations and ferments might give the key to the explanation of many morbid phenomena. The German doctor, Traube, had in 1864 explained the ammoniacal fermentation of urine, by reference to Pasteur's theory. The English surgeon. Dr. Lister, wrote in 1874 to Pasteur that he owed to him the idea of the antiseptic treatment of wounds which he had been practicing since 1865. Professor Tyndall wrote to him, in 1876, after having read his investigations for the second time: "For the first time in the history of science we have a right to entertain the sure and certain hope that, as to epidemic diseases, medicine will shortly be delivered from empiricism and placed upon a really scientific basis. When that great day shall come, mankind will, in my opinion, recognize that it is to you that the greatest part of its gratitude is due."

The domestic animals of France and other countries had been subject to a carbuncular disease, like the malignant pustule of man, which took different forms and had different names in different species, but was evidently the same in nature. A medical commission had, between 1849 and 1852, made an investigation of it and found it transmissible by inoculation from animal to animal. Drs. Davaine and Rayer had, at the same time, found in the blood of the diseased animals minute filiform bodies, to which they paid no further attention for thirteen years, or till after Pasteur's observations on fermentation had been widely spread. Then, Davaine concluded that these corpuscles were the source of the disease. He was contradicted by MM. Jaillard and Leplat, who had inoculated various animals with matter procured from sheep and cows that had died of the disease without obtaining a development of the bodies in question. Davaine suggested that they had used the wrong matter, but they replied that they had obtained it direct from an unmistakable source. Their views were supported by the German Dr. Koch and M. Paul Bert. At this point, M. Pasteur stepped in and began experiments after methods which had served him as sure guides in his studies of twenty years. They were at once simple and delicate. "Did he wish, for example, to demonstrate that