PASTEUR
AND THE MAD DOG
I
Do not think for a moment that Pasteur allowed his fame and name to
be forgotten in the excitement kicked up by the sensational proofs of
Koch that microbes murder men. It is certain that less of a hound for
sniffing out microbes, less of a poet, less of a master at keeping
people wide-eyed with their mouths open, would have been shoved off
into a fairly complete oblivion by such events--but not Pasteur!
It was in the late eighteen-seventies--Koch had just swept the
German doctors off their feet by his fine discovery of the spores
of anthrax--that Pasteur who was only a chemist, had the effrontery
to dismiss with a grunt, a shrug, and a wave of his hand, the ten
thousand years of experience of doctors in studying and fighting
diseases. At this time, in spite of Semmelweis, the Austrian who had
proved child-bed fever was contagious, the Lying-In hospitals of
Paris were pest-holes. Out of every nineteen women who went hopeful
into their doors, one was sure to die of child-bed fever, to leave
her baby motherless. One of these places, where ten young mothers
perished in succession, was called the House of Crime. Women hardly
dared to trust themselves to the most expensive physicians; they
were beginning to boycott the hospitals. Large numbers of them--with
reason--no longer cared to risk the grim danger of having babies.
Even the doctors themselves--accustomed though they were helplessly
but sympathetically to preside at the demise of their patients--even
the physicians themselves, I say, were scandalized at this dreadful
presence of death at the birth of new life.
One day, at the Academy of Medicine in Paris, a famous physician
was holding an oration, with plenty of long Greek and elegant Latin
words, on the cause--alas, completely unknown to him--of child-bed
fever. Suddenly one of his learned and stately sentences was
interrupted by a voice bellowing from the rear of the hall:
“The thing that kills women with child-bed fever--it isn’t anything
like that! It is you doctors that carry deadly microbes from sick
women to healthy ones...!” It was Pasteur who said this; he was out
of his seat; his eyes flamed excitement.
“Possibly you are right, but I fear you will never find that
microbe----” The orator tried to start his speech again, but by this
time Pasteur was charging up the aisle, dragging his partly paralyzed
left leg behind him a little. He reached the blackboard, grabbed a
piece of chalk and shouted to the annoyed orator and the scandalized
Academy:
“You say I will not find the microbe? Man, I have found it! Here’s
the way it looks!” And Pasteur scrawled a chain of little circles on
the blackboard. The meeting broke up in confusion.
Pasteur was in his late fifties now, but he was still as impetuous
and enthusiastic as he had been at twenty-five. He had been a chemist
and an expert on beet-sugar fermentations, he had shown the vintners
how to keep their wines from spoiling, he had rushed from this job
into the saving of sick silkworms, he had preached the slogan of
Better Beer for France and had really made the French beer better;
but during all these hectic years while he was doing the life work
of a dozen men Pasteur dreamed about the tracking down of microbes
that he knew must be the scourges of the human race, the authors of
disease.
Then suddenly he found Koch had done the trick ahead of him. He must
catch up with this Koch. “Microbes are in a way mine--I was the
first to show how important they were, twenty years ago, when Koch
was a child....” you can imagine Pasteur muttering. But there were
difficulties in the way of his catching up.
In the first place, Pasteur had never felt a pulse or told a bilious
man to stick out his tongue, it is doubtful if he could have
told a lung from a liver, and it is certain that he did not know
the first thing about how to hold a scalpel. As for those cursed
hospitals--phew! The smell of them gave him nasty feelings at the
pit of his stomach, and he wanted to stop his ears and run away from
the moans that floated down their dingy corridors. But presently--it
was ever the way with this unconquerable man--he got around his
medical ignorance. Three physicians, Joubert at first, and then Roux
and Chamberland became his assistants; youngsters they were, these
three, radicals who were Bolshevik against ancient idiotic medical
doctrines. They sat worshiping Pasteur at his unpopular lectures
in the Academy of Medicine, believing every one of his laughed-at
prophecies of dreadful scourges caused by sub-visible bugs. He
took these boys into his laboratory and in return they explained
the machinery of animals’ insides to Pasteur, they taught him the
difference between the needle and the plunger of a hypodermic syringe
and convinced him--he was very squeamish about such things--that
animals like guinea-pigs and rabbits hardly felt the prick of the
syringe needle when he injected them. Privately these three men swore
to be his slaves--and the priests of this new science....
Nothing is truer than that there is no one orthodox way of hunting
microbes, and the differences between the ways Koch and Pasteur went
at their work are the best illustrations of this. Koch was as coldly
logical as a text-book of geometry--he searched out his bacillus of
tuberculosis with systematic experiments, and he thought of all the
objections that doubters might make before such doubters knew that
there was anything to have doubts about. Koch always recited his
failures with just as much and no more enthusiasm than he did his
triumphs. There was something inhumanly just and right about him
and he looked at his own discoveries as if they had been those of
another man of whom he was a little over-critical. But Pasteur! This
man was a passionate groper whose head was incessantly inventing
right theories and wrong guesses--shooting them out like a display of
village fireworks going off bewilderingly by accident.
Pasteur started hunting microbes of disease and punched into a boil
on the back of the neck of one of his assistants and grew a germ from
it and was sure it was the cause of boils; he hurried from these
experiments to the hospital to find his chain microbes in the bodies
of women dying with child-bed fever; from here he rushed out into the
country to discover--but not to prove it precisely--that earthworms
carry anthrax bacilli from the deep buried carcasses of cattle to the
surface of the fields. He was a strange genius who seemed to need the
energetic, gusto-ish doing of a dozen things at the same time--more
or less accurately--in order to discover that grain of truth which
lies at the bottom of most of his work.
In this variety of simultaneous goings-on you can fairly feel Pasteur
fumbling at a way of getting ahead of Koch. Koch had shown with
beautiful clearness that germs cause disease, there is no doubt
about that--but this isn’t the most important thing to do ... this
is nothing, this proof, the thing to do is to find a way to prevent
the germs from killing people, to protect mankind from death! “What
impossible, what absurd experiments didn’t we discuss,” said Roux
long after this distressing time when Pasteur was stumbling about in
the dark. “We would laugh at them ourselves, next day.”
To understand Pasteur, it is important to know his wild stabs and his
failures as well as his triumphs. He had not the precise methods of
growing microbes pure--it took the patience of Koch to devise such
things--and one day to his disgust, Pasteur observed that a bottle of
boiled urine in which he had planted anthrax bacilli was swarming
with unbidden guests, contaminating microbes of the air that had
sneaked in. The following morning he observed that there were no
anthrax germs left at all; they had been completely choked out by the
bacilli from the air.
At once Pasteur jumped to a fine idea: “If the harmless bugs from the
air choke out the anthrax bacilli in the bottle, they will do it in
the body too! It is a kind of dog-eat-dog!” shouted Pasteur, and at
once he put Roux and Chamberland to work on the fantastic experiment
of giving guinea-pigs anthrax and then shooting doses of billions of
harmless microbes into them--beneficent germs which were to chase the
anthrax bacilli round the body and devour them--they were to be like
the mongoose which kills cobras....
Pasteur gravely announced: “That there were high hopes for the cure
of disease from this experiment,” but that is the last you hear of
it, for Pasteur was never a man to give the world of science the
benefit of studying his failures. But a little later the Academy of
Sciences sent him on a queer errand, and on this mission he stumbled
across a fact that gave him the first clew to a genuine, a remarkable
way of turning savage microbes into friendly ones. It was an
outlandish plan he began to devise, to dream about, of turning living
microbes of disease against their own kind, so guarding animals and
men from invisible deaths. At this time there was a great to-do
about a cure for anthrax, invented by the horse doctor, Louvrier,
in the Jura mountains in the east of France. Louvrier had cured
hundreds of cows who were at death’s door, said the influential men
of the district: it was time that this treatment received scientific
approval.
II
Pasteur arrived there, escorted by his young assistants, and found
that this miraculous cure consisted first, in having several farm
hands rub the sick cow violently to make her as hot as possible;
then long gashes were cut in the poor beast’s skin and into these
cuts Louvrier poured turpentine; finally the now bellowing and
deplorably maltreated cow was covered--excepting her face!--with an
inch thick layer of unmentionable stuff soaked in hot vinegar. This
ointment was kept on the animal--who now doubtless wished she were
dead--by a cloth that covered her entire body.
Pasteur said to Louvrier: “Let us make an experiment. All cows
attacked by anthrax do not die, some of them just get better by
themselves; there is only one way to find out, Doctor Louvrier,
whether or no it is your treatment that saves them.”
So four good healthy cows were brought, and Pasteur in the presence
of Louvrier and a solemn commission of farmers, shot a powerful dose
of virulent anthrax microbes into the shoulder of each one of these
beasts: this stuff would have surely killed a sheep, it was enough
to do to death a few dozen guinea-pigs. The next day Pasteur and the
commission and Louvrier returned, and all the cows had large feverish
swellings on their shoulders, their breath came in snorts--they were
in a bad way, that was very evident.
“Now, Doctor,” said Pasteur, “choose two of these sick cows--we’ll
call them A and B. Give them your new cure, and we’ll leave cows C
and D without any treatment at all.” So Louvrier assaulted poor A and
B with his villainous treatment. The result was a terrible blow to
the sincere would-be curer of cows, for one of the cows that Louvrier
treated got better--but the other perished; and one of the creatures
that had got no treatment at all, died--but the other got better.
“Even this experiment might have tricked us, Doctor,” said Pasteur.
“If you had given your treatment to cows A and D instead of A and
B--we all would have thought you had really found a sovereign remedy
for anthrax.”
Here were two cows left over from the experiment, beasts that had
had a hard siege of anthrax and got better from it: “What shall I do
with these two cows?” pondered Pasteur. “Well, I might try shooting
a still more savage strain of anthrax bacilli into them--I have one
family of anthrax germs in Paris that would give even a rhinoceros a
bad night.”
So Pasteur sent to Paris for his vicious cultivation, and injected
five drops into the shoulders of those two cows that had got better.
Then he waited, but nothing happened to the beasts, not even a tiny
swelling at the point where he had injected millions of poisonous
bacilli; the cows remained perfectly happy!
Then Pasteur jumped to one of his quick conclusions: “Once a cow has
anthrax, but gets better from it, all the anthrax microbes in the
world cannot give her another attack--she is _immune_.” This thought
began playing and flitting about in his head and made him wool-gather
so that he did not hear questions that Madame Pasteur asked him, nor
see obvious things at which his eyes looked directly.
“How to give an animal a _little_ attack of anthrax, a safe little
attack that won’t kill him, but will surely protect him.... There
must be a way to do that.... I must find a way.”
So it went with Pasteur for months and he kept saying to Roux
and Chamberland: “What mystery is there, like the mystery of the
non-recurrence of virulent maladies?” He went about muttering to
himself: “We must immunize--we must immunize against microbes....”
Meanwhile Pasteur and his faithful crew were training their
microscopes on stuff from men and animals dead of a dozen different
diseases; there was a kind of mixed-up fumbling in this work between
1878 and 1880--when one day fate, or God, put a marvelous way to
immunize right under Pasteur’s lucky nose. (It is hard for me to give
you this story exactly straight because all of the various people who
have written about Pasteur tell it differently and Pasteur himself
in his scientific paper says nothing whatever about this remarkable
discovery having been a happy accident.) But here it is, as well as I
can do, with certain gaps that I have had to fill in myself.
In 1880, Pasteur was playing with the very tiny microbe that kills
chickens with a malady known as chicken cholera. Doctor Peronçito
had discovered this microbe, so tiny that it was hardly more than
a quivering point before the strongest lens. Pasteur was the first
microbe hunter to grow it pure, in a soup that he cooked for it from
chicken meat. And after he had watched these dancing points multiply
into millions in a few hours, he let fall the smallest part of a
drop of this bug-swarming broth onto a crumb of bread--and fed this
bread to a chicken. In a few hours the unfortunate beast stopped
clucking and refused to eat, her feathers ruffled until she looked
like a fluffy ball, and the next day Pasteur came in to find the bird
tottering, its eyes shut in a kind of invincible drowsiness that
turned quickly into death.
Roux and Chamberland nursed these terrible wee microbes along
carefully; day after day they dipped a clean platinum needle into a
bottle of chicken broth that teemed with germs and then carefully
shook the same still-wet needle into a fresh flask of soup that held
no microbe at all--so day after day these transplantations went
on--always with new myriads of germs growing from the few that had
come in on the moistened needle. The benches of the laboratory became
cluttered with abandoned cultures, some of them weeks old. “We’ll
have to clean this mess up to-morrow,” thought Pasteur.
Then the god of good accidents whispered in his ear, and Pasteur
said to Roux: “We know the chicken cholera microbes are still alive
in this bottle ... they’re several weeks old, it is true ... but
just try shooting a few drops of this old cultivation into some
chickens....”
Roux followed these directions and the chickens promptly got sick,
turned drowsy, lost their customary lively frivolousness. But next
morning, when Pasteur came into the laboratory looking for these
birds, to put them on the post-mortem board--he was sure they would
be dead--he found them perfectly happy and gay!
“This is strange,” pondered Pasteur, “always before this the
microbes from our cultivations have killed twenty chickens out of
twenty....” But the time for his discovery was not yet, and next day,
after these strangely recovered chickens had been put in charge of
the caretaker, Pasteur and his family and Roux and Chamberland went
off on their summer vacations. They forgot about those birds....
But at last one day Pasteur told the laboratory servant: “Bring up
some healthy birds, new chickens, and get them ready for inoculation.”
“But we only have a couple of unused chickens left, Mr.
Pasteur--remember, you used the last ones before you went away--you
injected the old cultures into them, and they got sick but didn’t
die?”
Pasteur made a few appropriate remarks about servants who neglected
to keep a good supply of fresh chickens on hand. “Well, all right,
bring up what new chickens you have left--and let’s have a couple of
those used ones too--the ones that had the cholera but got better....”
The squawking birds were brought up. The assistant shot the soup with
its myriads of germs into the breast muscles of the chickens--into
the new ones, _and into the ones that had got better_! Roux and
Chamberland came into the laboratory next morning--Pasteur was always
there an hour or so ahead of them--they heard the muffled voice of
their master shouting to them from the animal room below stairs:
“Roux, Chamberland, come down here--hurry!”
They found him pacing up and down before the chicken cages. “Look!”
said Pasteur. “The new birds we shot yesterday--they’re dead all
right, as they ought to be.... But now see these chickens that
recovered after we shot them with the old cultures last month....
They got the same murderous dose yesterday--but look at them--they
have resisted the virulent dose perfectly ... they are gay ... they
are eating!”
Roux and Chamberland were puzzled for a moment.
Then Pasteur raved: “But don’t you see what this means? Everything
is found! Now I have found out how to make a beast a little
sick--just a little sick so that he will get better, from a
disease.... All we have to do is to let our virulent microbes grow
old in their bottles ... instead of planting them into new ones
every day.... When the microbes age, they get tame ... they give
the chicken the disease ... but only a little of it ... and when
she gets better she can stand all the vicious virulent microbes
in the world.... This is our chance--this is my most remarkable
discovery--this is a _vaccine_ I’ve discovered, much more sure,
more scientific than the one for smallpox where no one has seen
the germ.... We’ll apply this to anthrax too ... to all virulent
diseases.... We will save lives...!”
III
A lesser man than Pasteur might have done this same accidental
experiment--for this was no test planned by the human brain--a lesser
man might have done it and would have spent years trying to explain
to himself the mystery of it, but Pasteur, stumbling on this chance
protection of a couple of miserable chickens, saw at once a new way
of guarding living things against virulent germs, of saving men
from death. His brain jumped to a new way of tricking the hitherto
inexorable God who ruled that men must be helpless before the
sneaking attacks of his sub-visible enemies....
Pasteur was fifty-eight years old now, he was past his prime, but
with this chance discovery of the vaccine that saved chickens
from cholera, he started the six most hectic years of his life,
years of appalling arguments and unhoped-for triumphs and terrible
disappointments--into these years, in short, he poured the energy and
the events of the lives of a hundred ordinary men.
Hurriedly Pasteur and Roux and Chamberland set out to confirm the
first chance observation they had made. They let virulent chicken
cholera microbes grow old in their bottles of broth; they inoculated
these enfeebled bugs into dozens of healthy chickens--which
promptly got sick, but as quickly recovered. Then triumphantly,
a few days later, they watched these birds--these _vaccinated_
chickens--tolerate murderous injections of millions of microbes,
enough to kill a dozen new birds who were not immune.
So it was that Pasteur, ingeniously, turned microbes against
themselves. He tamed them first, and then he strangely used them for
wonderful protective weapons against the assaults of their own kind.
And now Pasteur, with his characteristic impetuousness--after all it
was only chickens he had learned to guard from death so far--became
more arrogant than ever with the old-fashioned doctors who talked
Latin words and wrote shot-gun prescriptions. He went to a meeting
of the Academy of Medicine and with complaisance told the doctors
how his chicken vaccinations were a great advance on the immortal
smallpox discovery of Jenner: “In this case I have demonstrated a
thing that Jenner never could do in smallpox--and that is, that the
microbe that kills is the same one that guards the animal from death!”
The old-fashioned blue-coated doctors were peeved at Pasteur’s
appointing himself a god superior to the great Jenner; Doctor Jules
Guérin, the famous surgeon, became particularly sarcastic about
Pasteur making so much of mere fussings with chickens--and the fight
was on. Pasteur, in a fury got up and shouted remarks about the utter
nonsensicality of one of Guérin’s pet operations, and there occurred
a most scandalous scene--it embarrasses me to have to tell about
it--a strange shambles in which Guérin, who was past eighty, rose
from his seat and was about to fall on the sixty-year-old Pasteur.
The old man aimed a wallop at Pasteur, but frantic friends jumped in
and prevented the impending fisticuffs of these two men who thought
they could settle the truth by kicks and blows and mayhem.
Next day the ancient Guérin sent his seconds to Pasteur with a
challenge to a duel, but Pasteur, evidently, did not care to risk
dying that way and he sent Guérin’s friends to the Secretary of
the Academy with this message: “I am ready, having no right to act
otherwise, to modify whatever the editors may consider as going
beyond the rights of criticism and legitimate defense.” And so
Pasteur once more proved himself to be a human being--if not what is
commonly called a man--by backing out of the fight.
As I have told you before, Pasteur had a great deal of the mystic in
him. Often he bowed himself down before that mysterious Infinite--he
worshiped the Infinite when he was not clutching at it like a
baby reaching for the moon; but frequently, the moment one of his
beautiful experiments had knocked another little chunk off that
surrounding Unknown, he made the mistake of believing that all
mysteries had dissolved away. It was so now--when he saw that he
could really protect chickens perfectly against a fatal illness by
his amazing trick of sticking a few of their own tamed assassins into
them. At once Pasteur guessed: “Maybe these fowl-cholera microbes
will guard chickens against other virulent diseases!” and promptly he
inoculated some hens with his new vaccine of weakened fowl-cholera
germs and then injected them with some certainly murderous _anthrax_
bacilli--and the chickens did not die!
Wildly excited he wrote to Dumas, his old professor, and hinted that
the new fowl-cholera vaccine might be a wonderful Pan-Protector
against all kinds of virulent maladies. “If this is confirmed,” he
wrote, “we can hope for the most important consequences, even in
human maladies.”
Old Dumas, greatly thrilled, had this letter published in the Reports
of the Academy of Sciences, and there it stands, a sad monument to
Pasteur’s impetuousness, a blot on his record of reporting nothing
but _facts_. So far as I can find, Pasteur never retracted this
error, although he soon found that a vaccine made from one kind
of bacillus does not protect an animal against all diseases, but
only--and then not absolutely surely--against the one disease of
which the microbe in the vaccine is the cause.
But one of Pasteur’s most charming traits was his characteristic
of a scientific Phœnix, who rose triumphantly from the ashes of
his own mistakes. When his imagination carried him into the clouds
you find him presently landing on the ground with a bump--making
clever experiments again, digging for good true hard facts. So it
is not surprising to find him, with Roux and Chamberland, in 1881,
discovering a very pretty way of taming vicious anthrax microbes
and turning them into a vaccine. By this time the quest after
vaccines had become so violent that Roux and Chamberland hardly had
their Sundays off, and never went on vacations; they slept at the
laboratory to be near their tubes and microscopes and microbes.
And here, Pasteur directing them, they delicately weakened anthrax
bacilli so that some killed guinea-pigs, but not rabbits, and others
did mice to death, but were too weak to harm guinea-pigs. They shot
the weaker and then the stronger microbes into sheep, who got a
little sick but then recovered, and after that these sheep could
stand, apparently, the assaults of vicious anthrax germs that were
able to kill even a cow.
At once Pasteur told this new triumph to the Academy of Sciences--he
had left off going to the Academy of Medicine after his brawl with
Guérin--and he held out purple hopes to them that he would presently
invent ingenious vaccines that would wipe out all diseases from mumps
to malaria. “What is more easy,” he shouted, “than to find in these
successive viruses a vaccine capable of making sheep and cows and
horses a little sick with anthrax without letting them perish--and
so preserving them from subsequent maladies?” Some of Pasteur’s
colleagues thought he was a little cocksure about this, and they
ventured to protest. Pasteur’s veins stood out on his forehead, but
he managed to keep his mouth shut until he and Roux were on the way
home, when he burst out, speaking really of all people who failed to
see the absolute truth of his idea:
“I would not be surprised if such a man were to be caught beating his
wife!”
Make no mistake--science was no cool collecting of facts for Pasteur;
in him it set going the same kind of machinery that stirs the human
animal to tears at the death of a baby and makes him sing when he
hears his uncle has died and left him five hundred thousand dollars.
But enemies were on Pasteur’s trail again. Just as he was always
stepping on the toes of physicians, so he had offended the high and
useful profession of the horse doctors, and one of the leading horse
doctors, the editor of one of the most important journals of horse
doctoring, his name was Doctor Rossignol, cooked up a plot to lure
Pasteur into a dangerous public experiment and so destroy him. This
Rossignol got up with a great show of scientific fairness at the
Agricultural Society of Melun and said:
“Pasteur claims that nothing is easier than to make a vaccine that
will protect sheep and cows absolutely from anthrax. If that is true,
it would be a great thing for French farmers, who are now losing
twenty million francs a year from this disease. Well, if Pasteur can
really make such magic stuff, he ought to be willing to prove to
us that he has the goods. Let us get Pasteur to consent to a grand
public experiment; if he is right, we farmers and veterinarians are
the gainers--if it fails, Pasteur will have to stop his eternal
blabbing about great discoveries that save sheep and worms and babies
and hippopotamuses!” Like this argued the sly Rossignol.
At once the Society raised a lot of francs to buy forty-eight sheep
and two goats and several cows and the distinguished old Baron de la
Rochette was sent to flatter Pasteur into this dangerous experiment.
But Pasteur was not one bit suspicious. “Of course I am willing to
demonstrate to your society that my vaccine is a life-saver--what
will work in the laboratory on fourteen sheep will work on sixty at
Melun!”
That was the great thing about Pasteur! When he prepared to take
the rabbit out of the hat, to astonish the world, he was absolutely
sincere about it; he was a magnificent showman and not below some
small occasional hocus-pocus, but he was no designing mountebank. And
the public test was set for May and June, that year.
Roux and Chamberland--who had begun to see animals that were strange
combinations of chickens and guinea-pigs in their dreams, to drop
important flasks, to lie awake injecting millions of imaginary
guinea-pigs, these fagged-out boys had just started off on a vacation
to the country--when they received telegrams that brought them back
to their exciting treadmill:
COME BACK PARIS AT ONCE ABOUT TO MAKE PUBLIC DEMONSTRATION THAT OUR
VACCINE WILL PROTECT SHEEP AGAINST ANTHRAX--L. PASTEUR.
Something like that read these wires.
They hurried back. Pasteur said to them: “Before the Agricultural
Society of Melun, at the farm of Pouilly-le-Fort, I am going to
vaccinate twenty-four sheep, one goat and several cattle--twenty-four
other sheep, one goat and several other cattle are going to be left
without inoculation--then, at the appointed time, I am going to
inject _all_ of the beasts with the most deadly virulent culture
of anthrax bacilli that we have. The vaccinated animals will be
perfectly protected--the not-vaccinated ones will die in two days of
course.” Pasteur sounded as confident as an astronomer predicting an
eclipse of the sun....
“But, master, you know this work is so delicate--we _cannot_ be
absolutely sure of our vaccines--they may kill some of the sheep we
try to protect----”
“WHAT WORKED WITH FOURTEEN SHEEP IN OUR LABORATORY WILL WORK WITH
FIFTY AT MELUN!” Pasteur roared at them. For him just then, there
was no such thing as a mysterious, tricky nature, an unknown full of
failures and surprises--the misty Infinite was as simple as two plus
two makes four to him just then. So there was nothing for Roux and
Chamberland to do but to roll up their sleeves and get the vaccines
ready.
The day for the first injections came at last. Their bottles and
syringes were ready, their flasks were carefully labeled--“Be sure
not to mix up the first and second vaccine, boys!” shouted Pasteur,
full of a gay confidence, as they left the Rue d’Ulm for the train.
As they came on the field at Pouilly-le-Fort, and strode toward the
sheds that held the forty-eight sheep, two goats and several cattle,
Pasteur marched into the arena like a matador, and bowed severely to
the crowd. There were senators of the Republic there, and scientists
and horse doctors and dignitaries, and hundreds of farmers; and as
Pasteur walked among them with his little limp--it was however a sort
of jaunty limp--they cheered him mightily, many of them, and some of
them snickered.
And there was a flock of newspaper men there, including the now
almost legendary de Blowitz, of the London _Times_.
The sheep, fine healthy beasts, were herded into a clear space; Roux
and Chamberland lighted their alcohol lamps and gingerly unpacked
their glass syringes and shot five drops of the first vaccine--the
anthrax bacilli that would kill mice but leave guinea-pigs alive,
into the thighs of twenty-four of the sheep, one of the goats, and
half of the cattle. The beasts got up and shook themselves and
were labeled by a little gouge punched out of their ears. Then the
audience repaired to a shed where Pasteur harangued them for half an
hour--telling them simply but with a kind of dramatic portentousness
of these new vaccinations and the hopes they held out for suffering
men.
Twelve days went by and the show was repeated. The crowd was there
once more and the second vaccine--the stronger one whose bacilli
had the power of killing guinea-pigs but not rabbits--was injected,
and the animals bore up beautifully under it and scampered about as
healthy sheep, goats and cattle should do. The time for the fatal
final test drew near; the very air of the little laboratory became
finicky; the taut workers snapped at each other across the Bunsen
flames. Pasteur was never so appallingly quiet--and the bottle
washers fairly jumped across the room to fill his growled orders.
Every day Thuillier, Pasteur’s new youngest assistant, went out to
the farm to put his thermometer carefully under the tails of the
inoculated animals to see if they had fever--but thank God, every
one of them was standing up beautifully under the heavy dose of the
vaccine that was not quite murderous enough to kill rabbits.
While the heads of Roux and Chamberland turned several hairs grayer,
Pasteur kept his confidence, and he wrote, with his old charmingly
candid opinion of himself: “If success is complete, this will be
one of the finest examples of applied science in this country,
consecrating one of the greatest and most fruitful discoveries.”
His friends shook their heads and lifted their shoulders and
murmured: “Napoleonic, my dear Pasteur,” and Pasteur did not deny it.
IV
Then on the fateful thirty-first of May all of the forty-eight sheep,
two goats, and several cattle--those that were vaccinated and those
to which nothing whatever had been done--all of these received a
surely fatal dose of virulent anthrax bugs. Roux got down on his
knees in the dirt, surrounded by his alcohol lamps and bottles of
deadly virus, and awed the crowd by his cool flawless shooting of the
poisonous stuff into the more than sixty animals.
With his whole scientific reputation trusted to this one delicate
test, realizing at last that he had done the brave but terribly rash
thing of letting a frivolous public judge his science, Pasteur rolled
and tossed around in his bed and got up fifty times that night. He
said absolutely nothing when Madame Pasteur tried to encourage him
and told him, “Now now everything will come out all right”; he sulked
in and out of the laboratory; there is no record of it, but without
a doubt he prayed....
Pasteur did not fancy going up in balloons and he would not fight
duels--but no one can question his absolute gameness when he let the
horse doctors get him into this dangerous test.
The crowd that came to judge Pasteur on the famous second day of
June, 1881, made the previous ones look like mere assemblages at
country baseball games. General Councilors were here to-day as well
as senators; magnificoes turned out to see this show--tremendous
dignitaries who only exhibited themselves to the public at the
weddings and funerals of kings and princes. And the newspaper
reporters clustered around the famous de Blowitz.
At two o’clock Pasteur and his cohorts marched upon the field and
this time there were no snickers, but only a mighty bellowing of
hurrahs. Not one of the twenty-four vaccinated sheep--though two
days before millions of deadly germs had taken residence under their
hides--not one of these sheep, I say, had so much as a trace of
fever. They ate and frisked about as if they had never been within a
thousand miles of an anthrax bacillus.
But the unprotected, the not vaccinated beasts--alas--there they
lay in a tragic row, twenty-two out of twenty-four of them; and
the remaining two were staggering about, at grips with that last
inexorable, always victorious enemy of all living things. Ominous
black blood oozed from their mouths and noses.
“See! There goes another one of those sheep that Pasteur did not
vaccinate!” shouted an awed horse doctor.
V
The Bible does not go into details about what the great wedding crowd
thought of Jesus when he turned water into wine, but Pasteur, that
second of June, was the impresario of a modern miracle as amazing
as any of the marvels wrought by the Man of Galilee, and that day
Pasteur’s whole audience--who many of them had been snickering
skeptics--bowed down before this excitable little half-paralyzed
man who could so perfectly protect living creatures from the deadly
stings of sub-visible invaders. To me this beautiful experiment at
Pouilly-le-Fort is an utterly strange event in the history of man’s
fight against relentless nature. There is no record of Prometheus
bringing the precious fire to mankind amid applause; Galileo was
actually clapped in prison for those searchings that have done more
than any other to transform the world. We do not even know the names
of those completely anonymous geniuses who first built the wheel and
invented sails and thought to tame a horse.
VI
But here stood Louis Pasteur, while his twenty-four immune sheep
scampered about among the carcasses of the same number of pitiful
dead ones, here stood this man, I say, in a gruesomely gorgeous
stage-setting of an immortal drama, and all the world was there
to see and to record and to be converted to his own faith in his
passionate fight against needless death.
Now the experiment turned into the likeness of a revival. Doctor
Biot, a healer in horses who had been one of the most sarcastic
of the Pasteur-baiters, rushed up to him as the last of the
not-vaccinated sheep was dying, and cried: “Inoculate me with your
vaccines, Mr. Pasteur--just as you have done to those sheep you
have saved so wonderfully----Then I will submit to the injection of
the murderous virus! All men must be convinced of this marvelous
discovery!”
“It is true,” said another humbled enemy, “that I have made jokes
about microbes, but I am a repentant sinner!”
“Well, allow me to remind you of the words of the Gospel,” Pasteur
answered him. “Joy shall be in heaven over one sinner that repenteth,
more than over ninety and nine just persons that need no repentance.”
The great de Blowitz cheered and rushed off to file his telegram
to the London _Times_ and to the newspapers of the world: “The
experiment at Pouilly-le-Fort is a perfect, an unprecedented success.”
The world received this news and waited, confusedly believing that
Pasteur was a kind of Messiah who was going to lift from men the
burden of all suffering. France went wild and called him her greatest
son and conferred on him the Grand Cordon of the Legion of Honor.
Agricultural societies, horse doctors, poor farmers whose fields were
cursed with the poisonous virus of anthrax--all these sent telegrams
begging him for thousands of doses of the life-saving vaccine. And
Pasteur, with Roux and Chamberland and Thuillier, responded to them
with a magnificent disregard of their own health--and of science. For
Pasteur, poet that he was, had more faith than the wildest of his new
converts in this experiment.
In answer to these telegrams Pasteur turned the little laboratory
in the Rue d’Ulm into a vaccine factory--huge kettles bubbled and
simmered with the broth in which the tame, the life-saving, anthrax
bacilli were to grow. Delicately--but so frantically that it was not
quite delicate enough--Roux and Chamberland worked at weakening the
murderous bacilli just enough to make the sheep of France a little
sick, but not too sick from anthrax. Then all of them sweat at
pouring numerous gallons of this bacillus-swarming soup which was the
vaccine, into little bottles, a few ounces to each bottle, into clean
bottles that had to be absolutely free from all other germs. And they
had to do this subtle job without any proper apparatus whatever. I
marvel that Pasteur ever attempted it; surely there never has been
such blind confidence raised by one clear--but Lord! it might be
simply a lucky--experiment.
In moments snatched from this making of vaccine Roux and Chamberland
and Thuillier scurried up and down the land of France, and even to
Hungary. They inoculated two hundred sheep in this place and five
hundred and seventy-six in that--in less than a year hundreds of
thousands of beasts had got this life-saving stuff. These wandering
vaccinators would drag themselves back into the laboratory from their
hard trips, they would get back to Paris probably wanting to get a
few drinks or spend an evening with a pretty girl or loaf over a
pipe--but Pasteur could not stand the smell of tobacco smoke, and as
for wine and women, were not the sheep of France literally baa-ing to
be saved? So these young men who were slaves of this battler whose
one insane thought was “find-the-microbe-kill-the-microbe”--these
faithful fellows took off their coats and peered at anthrax bacilli
through the microscopes until their eye rims got red and their
eyelashes fell out. In the middle of this work--with the farmers of
France yelling for more vaccine--they began to have strange troubles:
contaminating germs that had no business there began to pop up among
the anthrax bacilli; all at once a weak vaccine that should have just
killed a mouse began to knock off large rabbits.... Then, just as the
scientific desperadoes got these messes straightened out, Pasteur
would come in, nagging at them, fuming, fussing because they took so
long at their experiments.
He wanted to try to find the deadly virus of hydrophobia.
And now at night the chittering of the guinea-pigs and the scurrying
fights of the buck-rabbits in their cages were drowned by the
eerie noise of mad dogs howling--sinister howls that kept Roux and
Chamberland and Thuillier from sleep.... What would Pasteur ever
have done--he surely would never have got far in his fight with the
messengers of death--without those fellows Roux and Chamberland and
Thuillier?
Gradually, it was hardly a year after the miracle of Pouilly-le-Fort,
it began to be evident that Pasteur, though a most original microbe
hunter, was not an infallible God. Disturbing letters began to pile
up on his desk; complaints from Montpothier and a dozen towns of
France, and from Packisch and Kapuvar in Hungary. Sheep were dying
from anthrax--not natural anthrax they had picked up in dangerous
fields, but anthrax they had got from those vaccines that were
meant to save them! From other places came sinister stories of how
the vaccine had failed to work--the vaccine had been paid for, whole
flocks of sheep had been injected, the farmers had gone to bed
breathing Thank-God-For-Our-Great-Man-Pasteur, only to wake up in
the morning to find their fields littered with the carcasses of dead
sheep, and these sheep--which ought to have been immune--had died
from the lurking anthrax spores that lay in their fields....
Pasteur began to hate to open his letters; he wanted to stop his ears
against snickers that sounded from around corners, and then--the
worst thing that could possibly happen--came a cold terribly exact
scientific report from the laboratory of that nasty little German
Koch in Berlin, and this report ripped the practicalness of the
anthrax vaccine to tatters. Pasteur knew that Koch was the most
accurate microbe hunter in the world.
There is no doubt that Pasteur lost some sleep from this aftermath of
his glorious discovery, but, God rest him, he was a gallant man. It
was not in him to admit, either to the public or to himself, that his
sweeping claims were wrong.
“Have not _I_ said that my vaccines made sheep a little sick with
anthrax, but never killed them, and protected them perfectly? Well, I
must stick to that,” you can hear him mutter between his teeth.
[Illustration: VACCINATING SHEEP FOR ANTHRAX]
What a searcher this Pasteur was, and yet how little of that fine
selfless candor of Socrates or Rabelais is to be found in him. But
he is not in any way to be blamed for that, for those two last were
only, in their way, looking for truth, while Pasteur’s work carried
him more and more into the frantic business of saving lives, and in
this matter truth is not of the first importance....
In 1882, while his desk was loaded with reports of disasters, Pasteur
went to Geneva, and there before the cream of disease-fighters of
the world he gave a thrilling speech, subject: “How to guard living
creatures from virulent maladies by injecting them with weakened
microbes.” Pasteur assured them that: “The general principles have
been found and one cannot refuse to believe that the future is rich
with the greatest hopes.”
“We are all animated with a superior passion, the passion for
progress and for truth!” he shouted--but unhappily he said no word
about those numerous occasions when his vaccine had killed sheep
instead of protecting them.
At this meeting Robert Koch sat blinking at Pasteur behind his
gold-rimmed spectacles and smiling under his weedy beard at such
an unscientific inspirational address. Pasteur seemed to feel
something hanging over him, and he challenged Koch to argue with him
publicly--knowing that Koch was a much better microbe hunter than
an argufier. “I will content myself with replying to Mr. Pasteur’s
address in a written paper, in the near future,” said Koch--who
coughed, and sat down.
In a little while this reply appeared. It was dreadful. In this
serio-comic answer Dr. Koch began by remarking that he had obtained
some of this precious so-called anthrax vaccine from the agent of Mr.
Pasteur.
Did Mr. Pasteur say that his _first_ vaccine would kill mice, but not
guinea-pigs? Dr. Koch had tested it, and it wouldn’t even kill mice.
But some queer samples of it killed sheep!
Did Mr. Pasteur maintain that his _second_ vaccine killed guinea-pigs
but not rabbits? Dr. Koch had carefully tested this one too, and
found that it often killed rabbits very promptly--and sometimes
sheep, poor beasts! which Mr. Pasteur claimed it would guard from
death.
Did Mr. Pasteur really believe that his vaccines were really pure
cultivations containing nothing but anthrax microbes? Dr. Koch had
studied them carefully and found them to be veritable menageries of
hideous scum-forming bacilli and strange cocci and other foreign
creatures that had no business there.
Finally, was Mr. Pasteur really burning so with a passion for truth?
Then why hadn’t he told of the bad results as well as the good ones,
that had followed the wholesale use of his vaccine?
“Such goings-on are perhaps suitable for the advertising of a
business house, but science should reject them vigorously,” finished
Koch, drily, devastatingly.
Then Pasteur went through the roof and answered Koch’s cool facts
in an amazing paper with arguments that would not have fooled the
jury of a country debating society. Did Koch dare to make believe
that Pasteur’s vaccines were full of contaminating microbes? “For
twenty years before Koch’s scientific birth in 1876, it has been my
one occupation to isolate and grow microbes in a pure state, and
therefore Koch’s insinuation that I do not know how to make pure
cultivations cannot be taken seriously!” shouted Pasteur.
The French nation, even the great men of the nation, patriotically
refused to believe that Koch had demoted their hero from the rank of
God of Science--what could you expect from a German anyway?--and they
promptly elected Pasteur to the _Académie Française_, the ultimate
honor to bestow on a Frenchman. And on the day of Pasteur’s admission
this fiery yes-man was welcomed to his place among the Immortal Forty
by the skeptical genius, Ernest Renan, the author who had changed
Jesus from a God into a good human being, a man who could forgive
everything because he understood everything. Renan knew that even if
Pasteur sometimes did suppress the truth, he was still sufficiently
marvelous. Renan was not a scientist but he was wise enough to know
that Pasteur had done a wonderful thing when he showed that weak bugs
may protect living beings against virulent ones--even if they would
not do it one hundred times out of one hundred.
Regard these two fantastically opposite men facing each other on
this solemn day. Pasteur the go-getter, an energetic fighter full of
a mixture of faiths that interfered, sometimes, with ultimate--and
maybe ugly--truth. And talking to him loftily sits the untroubled
Renan with the massiveness of Mount Everest, such a dreadful skeptic
that he probably was never quite convinced that he was himself
alive, so firmly doubting the value of doing anything that he had
become one of the fattest men in France.
Renan called Pasteur a genius and compared him to some of the
greatest men that ever lived and then gave the excited, paralyzed,
gray-haired, microbe hunter this mild admonition:
“Truth, Sir, is a great coquette; she will not be sought with too
much passion, but often is most amenable to indifference. She escapes
when apparently caught, but gives herself up if patiently waited for;
revealing herself after farewells have been said, but inexorable when
loved with too much fervor.”
Surely Renan was too wise to think that his lovely words would
ever change Pasteur one jot from the headlong untruthful hunter
after truth that he was. But just the same, these words sum up the
fundamental sadness of Pasteur’s life, they tell of the crown of
thorns that madmen wear whose dream it is to change a world in the
little seventy years they are allowed to live.
VII
And now Pasteur began--God knows why--to stick little hollow glass
tubes into the gaping mouths of dogs writhing mad with rabies. While
two servants pried apart and held open the jowls of a powerful
bulldog, Pasteur stuck his beard within a couple of inches of those
fangs whose snap meant the worst of deaths, and, sprinkled sometimes
with a maybe fatal spray, he sucked up the froth into his tube--to
get a specimen in which to hunt for the microbe of hydrophobia.
I wish to forget, now, everything that I have said about his
showmanship, his unsearcherlike go-gettings. This business of his
gray eyes looking that bulldog in the mouth--this was no grandstand
stuff.
Why did Pasteur set out to trap the germ of rabies? That is a
mystery, because there were a dozen other serious diseases, just
then, whose microbes had not yet been found, diseases that killed
many more people than rabies had ever put to death, diseases that
were not nearly so surely deadly to an adventurous experimenter as
rabies would be--if one of those dogs should get loose....
It must have been the artist, the poet in him that urged him on to
this most hard and dangerous hunting, for Pasteur himself said: “I
have always been haunted by the cries of those victims of the mad
wolf that came down the street of Arbois when I was a little boy....”
Pasteur knew the way the yells of a mad dog curdle the blood of every
one. He remembered that less than a hundred years before in France,
laws had to be passed against the poisoning, the strangling, the
shooting of wretched people whom frightened fellow-townsmen just
suspected of having rabies. Doubtless he saw himself the deliverer of
men from such crazy fear--such hopeless suffering.
And then, in this most magnificent and truest of all his searchings,
Pasteur started out, as he so often did, by making mistakes. In
the saliva of a little child dying from hydrophobia he discovered
a strange motionless germ that he gave the unscientific name
of “microbe-like-an-eight.” He read papers at the Academy that
hinted about this figure-eight germ having something to do with
the mysterious cause of hydrophobia. But in a little while this
trail proved to be a blind one, for with Roux and Chamberland
he found--after he had settled down and got his teeth into this
search--that this eight-microbe could be found in the mouths of many
healthy people who had never been anywhere near a mad dog.
Presently, late in 1882, he ran on to his first clew. “Mad dogs are
scarce just now, old Bourrel the veterinarian brings me very few
of them, and people with hydrophobia are still harder to get hold
of--we’ve got to produce this rabies in animals in our laboratory and
keep it going there--otherwise we won’t be able to go on studying it
steadily,” he pondered.
He was more than sixty, and he was tired.
Then one day, a lassoed mad dog was brought into the laboratory;
dangerously he was slid into a big cage with healthy dogs and
allowed to bite them. Roux and Chamberland fished froth out of
the mouth of this mad beast and sucked it up into syringes and
injected this stuff into rabbits and guinea-pigs. Then they waited
eagerly to see this menagerie develop the first signs of madness.
Sometimes--alas--the experiment worked, but other very irritating
times it did not; four healthy dogs had been bitten and six weeks
later they came in one morning to find two of these creatures lashing
about their cages, howling--but for months after that the other
two showed no sign of rabies; there was no rime or reason to this
business, no regularity, confound it! this was not _science_! And it
was the same with the guinea-pigs and rabbits: two of the rabbits
might drag out their hind legs with a paralysis--then die in dreadful
convulsions, but the other four would go on chewing their greens as
if there were no mad-dog virus within a million miles of them.
Then one day a little idea came to Pasteur, and he hurried to tell it
to Roux.
“This rabies virus that gets into people by bites, it settles in
their brains and spinal cords.... All the symptoms of hydrophobia
show that it’s the nervous system that this virus--this bug we can’t
find--attacks....
“That’s where we have to look for the unknown microbe ... that’s
where we can grow it maybe, even without seeing it ... maybe we could
use the living animal’s brain instead of a bottle of soup ... a funny
culture-bottle that would be, but....
“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....”