[Illustration: BY LAFON.]
[Illustration: BUST BY P. DUBOIS.]
[Illustration: BY BONNAT.]
[Illustration: BY A. EDELFALT.]
The newness of the Pasteur doctrines and treatment is, indeed, one of
the most striking things about the Institute. One rubs his eyes to
remember that, thirteen years ago, very few people admitted the _role_
of bacteria in the world, and that those who did admit their existence
were very much at sea about what to do with them.
The doctrine of microbe, the theory that ferments and virus are living
beings, that a vaccine is an attenuated virus, that medicine is based
on the artificial attenuation of virus--all this is now so widely
received, is so thoroughly a part of popular belief, that one is
bewildered in remembering that twelve years ago the general theory of
disease was that it is "in us, from us, by us." Especially is all this
astonishing, standing in the Pasteur Institute, the crystallization of
the microbe doctrine.
"Yes," continued Doctor Roux, "we have conquered hydrophobia; nothing
is more certain."
"And you hope to conquer other diseases in the same way?"
The doctor made a fine nervous gesture. "In science one does not hope;
one proves. In every thirty thousand experiments one succeeds. We
study diseases here. Each physician has his special line of
investigation. We hope for nothing. We simply report what we find."
"But you yourself, Doctor Roux, have certainly hopes that diphtheria
is almost conquered?"
The doctor pursed up his mouth.
"The investigations in diphtheria are in just this condition. We have
proved at the Pasteur Institute" (Doctor Roux is modest and says 'we,'
which means himself and his assistant, M. Versin) "that diphtheria is
a toxic disease; that is, that it results from a poison. The microbe
of diphtheria does not penetrate throughout the system as in the case
of most other microbic diseases. It exists only in the mucus found on
the pharynx. This microbe does not cause death, but it secretes a
poison which penetrates throughout the body and kills. This being
proved, of course the next step is to find what will destroy the
poison.
"Doctor Behring, working at Berlin, has found that the blood of
animals vaccinated for diphtheria gives a therapeutic serum which
destroys the diphtheric poison. We are now testing the practical value
of the serum at the Institute. This is absolutely our 'last word' on
diphtheria."
"And as for cholera! What is the last word?"
"The _bacillus virgula_ of Doctor Koch is believed, by the great
majority of savants, to be the true cholera germ. We are trying
here, as experimenters are trying elsewhere, to give immunity to
animals against the microbe. It is absolutely all that one can say
authoritatively on the cholera."
"And the method of vaccination which Doctor Haffkine believes he has
discovered?"
"It has not been proved yet that it will give immunity. Until we have
that proof we neither hope nor fear. We simply work and wait. Doctor
Haffkine has, you know, severed his connection with the Pasteur
Institute and gone to India to continue his researches."
"But he has had faith enough in his method to try its effects on
himself, has he not?"
"Very true, and so have perhaps a hundred others tried its effects.
But that proves nothing."
There is a self-repression about these severe statements which has
something of the heroic in it. Who would be so glad to announce
absolute safeguards against diphtheria and cholera as this man who has
risked his life to find them? Yet, until he is sure, he will not even
say "hope."
I remember the words of Pasteur himself: "To believe that one has
found an important scientific fact, to be in a fever to announce it,
to compel one's self for days, weeks, sometimes years, to be silent,
to force one's self to destroy his own experiments and to announce
nothing until he has exhausted all contrary hypotheses--that is
hard."
It is hard, but it is one of the strongest elements in the Pasteur
spirit of scientific research. Evidently Doctor Roux has learned to
practise it vigorously.
"In the same way that we are investigating diphtheria and cholera,"
continues the doctor, "we are studying other diseases. But one cannot
get a fair idea of what the Pasteur Institute does by any other means
than looking at its organizations. There is a great deal done here
besides original investigation. In the first place, we are an
absolutely independent and free institution. The money was given by
popular subscription and without conditions.
"The entire lower floor is devoted to practical work. There are
performed the inoculations for hydrophobia on an average of some
seventy a day. The practical department is not, however, confined to
the treatment of hydrophobia. There are prepared the vaccines for all
those diseases of animals which M. Pasteur has proved can be cured by
inoculation, such as chicken cholera, splenic fever, and _rouget_ of
swine.
[Illustration: A GROUP OF PATIENTS.]
"Quantities of virus are sold constantly to farmers for vaccinating
their stock. It is these sales which help support the institution. It
is an example of science living by science.
"Here on this floor we do our instructing. In the lecture hall across
the way M. Ducloux gives his lessons on microbic chemistry, studies
the process of fermentation, microbic poisons, all phases, in short,
of biological chemistry.
"My work is lectures on, and experiments illustrating, the technique
of the microbic method. Those who follow the courses are divided into
two classes, students who simply follow the courses and repeat the
experiments in the general laboratory, and the savants who conduct
original researches here. The latter are furnished each with a private
laboratory in the third story. Here for a merely nominal rent they can
have the exclusive use of a laboratory furnished with all necessary
apparatus, and can pursue whatever class of investigation pleases
them."
"And you have many students?"
"We have always fifteen or twenty, and from all parts of the world.
Look at my roll."
The doctor rose and drew out from the mass of pamphlets and papers on
his table a big roll-book.
"I have the names of those who have taken my lectures. Here is an
Egyptian, many Russians, a Turk, numbers from South America, from
Canada, from the East, from everywhere. Let us look for your
compatriots."
Doctor Roux ran his finger down the pages. "Here is one, Doctor
Orchinard of New Orleans. Here another, Doctor Tabadie of New York;
and then there is Kenyoun of the United States Marine Service. But
there have been more students in the institution from South America
than from North.
[Illustration: THE LIBRARY.]
"The department of original work is in the third story, and is under
Doctor Metchnikoff, who is, you know, a Russian who has established
himself here in order to devote himself to scientific investigation.
Doctor Metchnikoff is aided by his wife, who acts as _preparateur_.
She is an assistant of great skill and delicacy. He receives no salary
for his labor. There are, in fact, three of the leading members of our
faculty who receive no salary--M. Pasteur himself, M. Ducloux, and M.
Metchnikoff. They have resigned the award they deserve because of our
insufficient income."
"But the common opinion is that you are rich here."
"I know, but it is a mistake. The Pasteur Institute is very poorly
endowed. Its yearly income is only about twenty-four thousand dollars.
This revenue comes from three sources: the small appropriations made
by the government, the income from the remnant of the private
subscription with which it was built, and the product of the sales of
vaccine. The fact that we can partly support ourselves," added the
doctor, laughingly, "is the best proof one can have of the
practicability of bacteriology.
"The most surprising feature about it is, that in the case of almost
every institution copied after us, and there are some eighteen or
twenty of them in various parts of the world, the income is much
larger than ours. At Berlin and St. Petersburg the incomes are four or
five times as large as ours, and, excepting Berlin, we are the only
Pasteur Institute doing practical work. It is the old story," said the
doctor resignedly, "one sows and another reaps."
[Illustration: M. ROUX.]
There is certainly injustice and short-sightedness in such a state of
things. The investigations of Pasteur have taken too heavy a bundle
from the load of horrors which humanity carries, to be allowed to be
limited for lack of money:
Immunity from infectious diseases, and nothing else is the logical
outcome of the Pasteur doctrines, means too much to make economy on
the part of purse-holders excusable, when it is a question of funds
for the investigations. When men like Doctor Roux and his associates,
men trained in the severe Pasteur spirit and passionate for truth, are
ready to sacrifice their lives to this work, overcoming the earth's
plagues, money is the last thing they should be wanting. Especially is
this true now, when the work on two of the most terrible scourges of
humanity--diphtheria and cholera--stands at critical stages.
There is something harshly ironical, too, in the idea that the
institution of Louis Pasteur, whose discoveries have, declares
Professor Huxley, made good the war indemnity of five thousand million
francs paid by France to Germany, should be crippled for funds.
The doctor's confidences were cut short by an imperative summons from
without. I rose to go.
"Take a stroll through the building," advised he as he said good-by. I
followed his advice.
[Illustration: DOSING THE VIRUS.]
From the library one naturally passes to the laboratories. They open
from the long halls in numbers. One wonders how so much room can be
utilized, but none seems to be going to waste. In each some step of
the microbic process is going on. Here is a doctor inoculating a
rabbit with the poison of a mad dog sent to the Institute only the day
before. The little animal lies on the table insensible, chloroformed,
while with the sharp-toothed little trephine the operator makes a tiny
hole in its skull, lays bare the brain, and inserts the virus. By the
time the aperture is closed Brer Rabbit is sitting up, looking about,
none the worse for his experience, save a bald spot on his forehead,
a tiny tin tag covered with hieroglyphics hanging from his ear. Two
minutes later he was nibbling a carrot; fifteen days later he died
"mad as a March hare."
It is not only rabbits which undergo this operation. Guinea-pigs,
chickens, mice and rats are used in quantities. In the laboratory of
autopsy there are to be seen aquariums filled with the dainty axolotl
of Mexico, glasses of odd fish, even cages of birds.
In another room an experimenter is dissecting a rabbit which has died
of rabies, and from whose spinal cord he expects to get material for
vaccinal virus.
[Illustration: DR. METCHNIKOFF IN HIS LABORATORY.]
In a small dark room, whose temperature is never allowed to vary,
which is never swept nor dusted for fear of arousing tranquil
microbes, and whose door is never opened except when absolutely
necessary, are arranged rows of drying bottles, in which hang bits of
the marrow. These bottles are marked with the degree of violence of
the rabies from which the animal died, and with the date when the
marrow was put up to dry.
Here, attendants are preparing the veal broth and the gelatines in
which the infected marrows will be cultivated.
[Illustration: FILLING THE SYRINGES.]
Thus as one goes from room to room he can follow the whole method of
successive cultures, that method which is "the key-stone of the arch,
and without which there could be no vigorous demonstration of the
Pasteur method."
On every hand one sees the interesting "ways of doing things" which
characterize the Institute. Here, the cleaning of jars, syringes and
tubes is going on; not a simple washing and drying. In the Pasteur
household articles are sterilized as well as cleaned--that is, burned
in the flames of a spirit lamp, or in an oven. There, a man is blowing
bulbs, droll balloon pipettes, all the multitude of glass contrivances
the laboratories demand. Here, under a microscope, an investigator has
the diphtheria pest, an inoffensive speck; there, another has in his
field a whole colony of lively little straight and bent sticks; it is
a company of Doctor Koch's cholera microbes.
Wherever one goes in the building there is a busy intentness, an
absorption, an absolute blindness to everything but the work in hand,
be it the contents of a culture tube, or the film on a microscope
slide. One can easily believe of these workers the story told of M.
Pasteur himself, that he had to be hunted up on his wedding morning
and pulled away from his microscope, in order to be got into his
dress-coat and gloves in time for the ceremony.
Evidently, too, they have not forgotten the words their master spoke
on the day of the inauguration of the Institute:
"All the enthusiasm you have had since the beginning, my dear
co-laborers, I beg of you to keep; but give it, as an inseparable
companion, a severe control. Announce nothing that you cannot prove in
a simple, decisive fashion.
"Cultivate the critical spirit. Left to itself it neither awakens
ideas nor stimulates to great deeds, but without it all is lost."
As one goes from room to room, and talks with one and another of the
busy, courteous savants, he realizes finally that it is here that
Pasteur the scientist is to be found. The labors that made the great
savant famous are all summed up here. Here his methods are at work,
here is his spirit alive in the men who have best comprehended him,
and whom he has been able most deeply to inspire. It is a great thing
to achieve. It is a greater thing to inspire others to achieve. Louis
Pasteur has done both.
[Illustration: THE RABBITS' QUARTERS.]