Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 27.djvu/105

Rh multiplication of bacillus anthracis in infusions is 44° C. (111° Fahr.). The temperature of the blood of birds is from 41° to 42° Fahr. It is therefore close to the prohibitory temperature. But then the blood globules of a living fowl are sure to offer a certain resistance to any attempt to deprive them of their oxygen—a resistance not experienced in an infusion. May not this resistance, added to the high temperature of the fowl, suffice to place it beyond the power of the parasite? Experiment alone could answer this question, and Pasteur made the experiment. By placing its feet in cold water he lowered the temperature of a fowl to 37° or 38° Fahr. He inoculated the fowl, thus chilled, with the splenic-fever parasite, and in twenty-four hours it was dead. The argument was clinched by inoculating a chilled fowl, permitting the fever to come to a head, and then removing the fowl, wrapped in cotton-wool, to a chamber with a temperature of 35° Fahr. The strength of the patient returned as the career of the parasite was brought to an end, and in a few hours health was restored. The sharpness of the reasoning here is only equaled by the conclusiveness of the experiment, which is full of suggestiveness as regards the treat ment of fevers in man.

Pasteur had little difficulty in establishing the parasitic origin of fowl-cholera; indeed, the parasite had been observed by others before him. But, by his successive cultivations, he rendered the solution sure. His next step will remain forever memorable in the history of medicine. I allude to what he calls "virus attenuation." And here it may be well to throw out a few remarks in advance. When a tree, or a bundle of wheat or barley straw, is burned, a certain amount of mineral matter remains in the ashes—extremely small in comparison with the bulk of the tree or of the straw, but absolutely essential to its growth. In a soil lacking, or exhausted of, the necessary mineral constituents, the tree can not live, the crop can not grow. Now, contagia are living things, which demand certain elements of life just as inexorably as trees, or wheat, or barley; and it is not difficult to see that a crop of a given parasite may so far use up a constituent existing in small quantities in the body, but essential to the growth of the parasite, as to render the body unfit for the production of a second crop. The soil is exhausted, and, until the lost constituent is restored, the body is protected from any further attack of the same disorder. Such an explanation of non-recurrent diseases naturally presents itself to a thorough believer in the germ theory, and such was the solution which, in reply to a question, I ventured to offer nearly fifteen years ago to an eminent London physician. To exhaust a soil, however, a parasite less vigorous and destructive than the really virulent one may suffice; and, if, after having by means of a feebler organism exhausted the soil, without fatal result, the most highly virulent parasite be introduced into the system, it will prove powerless. This, in the language of the germ theory, is the whole secret of vaccination.