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which has been the longest period devoted to these trials; and
the liquid, if it were naturally limpid, will not be in the least
polluted neither on its surface nor in its mass, although the
outside of the flask may become thickly coated with dust. This is
a most irrefutable proof of the impossibility of dust getting
inside the flask.
“The wort thus prepared remains uncontaminated indefinitely, in
spite of its susceptibility to change when exposed to the air
under conditions which allow it to gather the dusty particles
which float in the atmosphere. It is the same in the case of
urine, beef-tea, and grape-must, and generally with all those
putrefactable and fermentable liquids which have the property
when heated to boiling-point of destroying the vitality of dust
germs.”[7]
There was nothing in these studies bearing directly upon the
question of animal diseases, yet before they were finished they
had stimulated progress in more than one field of pathology. At
the very outset they sufficed to start afresh the inquiry as to
the role played by micro-organisms in disease. In particular they
led the French physician Devaine to return to some interrupted
studies which he had made ten years before in reference to the
animal disease called anthrax, or splenic fever, a disease that
cost the farmers of Europe millions of francs annually through
loss of sheep and cattle. In 1850 Devaine had seen multitudes of
bacteria in the blood of animals who had died of anthrax, but he
did not at that time think of them as having a causal relation to
the disease. Now, however, in 1863, stimulated by Pasteur’s new
revelations regarding the power of bacteria, he returned to the
subject, and soon became convinced, through experiments by means
of inoculation, that the microscopic organisms he had discovered
were the veritable and the sole cause of the infectious disease
anthrax.
The publication of this belief in 1863 aroused a furor of
controversy. That a microscopic vegetable could cause a virulent
systemic disease was an idea altogether too startling to be
accepted in a day, and the generality of biologists and
physicians demanded more convincing proofs than Devaine as yet
was able to offer.
Naturally a host of other investigators all over the world
entered the field. Foremost among these was the German Dr. Robert
Koch, who soon corroborated all that Devaine had observed, and
carried the experiments further in the direction of the
cultivation of successive generations of the bacteria in
artificial media, inoculations being made from such pure cultures
of the eighth generation, with the astonishing result that
animals thus inoculated succumbed to the disease.
Such experiments seem demonstrative, yet the world was
unconvinced, and in 1876, while the controversy was still at its
height, Pasteur was prevailed upon to take the matter in hand.
The great chemist was becoming more and more exclusively a
biologist as the years passed, and in recent years his famous
studies of the silk-worm diseases, which he proved due to
bacterial infection, and of the question of spontaneous
generation, had given him unequalled resources in microscopical
technique. And so when, with the aid of his laboratory associates
Duclaux and Chamberland and Roux, he took up the mooted anthrax
question the scientific world awaited the issue with bated
breath. And when, in 1877, Pasteur was ready to report on his
studies of anthrax, he came forward with such a wealth of
demonstrative experiments—experiments the rigid accuracy of
which no one would for a moment think of questioning—going to
prove the bacterial origin of anthrax, that scepticism was at
last quieted for all time to come.
Henceforth no one could doubt that the contagious disease anthrax
is due exclusively to the introduction into an animal’s system of
a specific germ—a microscopic plant—which develops there. And
no logical mind could have a reasonable doubt that what is proved
true of one infectious disease would some day be proved true also
of other, perhaps of all, forms of infectious maladies.
Hitherto the cause of contagion, by which certain maladies spread
from individual to individual, had been a total mystery, quite
unillumined by the vague terms “miasm,” “humor,” “virus,” and the
like cloaks of ignorance. Here and there a prophet of science,
as Schwann and Henle, had guessed the secret; but guessing, in
science, is far enough from knowing. Now, for the first time, the
world KNEW, and medicine had taken another gigantic stride
towards the heights of exact science.
LISTER AND ANTISEPTIC SURGERYMeantime, in a different though allied field of medicine there
had been a complementary growth that led to immediate results of
even more practical importance. I mean the theory and practice
of antisepsis in surgery. This advance, like the other, came as
a direct outgrowth of Pasteur’s fermentation studies of alcoholic
beverages, though not at the hands of Pasteur himself. Struck by
the boundless implications of Pasteur’s revelations regarding the
bacteria, Dr. Joseph Lister (the present Lord Lister), then of
Glasgow, set about as early as 1860 to make a wonderful
application of these ideas. If putrefaction is always due to
bacterial development, he argued, this must apply as well to
living as to dead tissues; hence the putrefactive changes which
occur in wounds and after operations on the human subject, from
which blood-poisoning so often follows, might be absolutely
prevented if the injured surfaces could be kept free from access
of the germs of decay.
In the hope of accomplishing this result, Lister began
experimenting with drugs that might kill the bacteria without
injury to the patient, and with means to prevent further access
of germs once a wound was freed from them. How well he succeeded
all the world knows; how bitterly he was antagonized for about a
score of years, most of the world has already forgotten. As early
as 1867 Lister was able to publish results pointing towards
success in his great project; yet so incredulous were surgeons in
general that even some years later the leading surgeons on the
Continent had not so much as heard of his efforts. In 1870 the
soldiers of Paris died, as of old, of hospital gangrene; and
when, in 1871, the French surgeon Alphonse Guerin, stimulated by
Pasteur’s studies, conceived the idea of dressing wounds with
cotton in the hope of keeping germs from entering them, he was
quite unaware that a British contemporary had preceded him by a
full decade in this effort at prevention and had made long
strides towards complete success. Lister’s priority, however, and
the superiority of his method, were freely admitted by the French
Academy of Sciences, which in 1881 officially crowned his
achievement, as the Royal Society of London had done the year
before.
By this time, to be sure, as everybody knows, Lister’s new
methods had made their way everywhere, revolutionizing the
practice of surgery and practically banishing from the earth
maladies that hitherto had been the terror of the surgeon and the
opprobrium of his art. And these bedside studies, conducted in
the end by thousands of men who had no knowledge of microscopy,
had a large share in establishing the general belief in the
causal relation that micro-organisms bear to disease, which by
about the year 1880 had taken possession of the medical world.
But they did more; they brought into equal prominence the idea
that, the cause of a diseased condition being known, it maybe
possible as never before to grapple with and eradicate that
condition.
PREVENTIVE INOCULATIONThe controversy over spontaneous generation, which, thanks to
Pasteur and Tyndall, had just been brought to a termination, made
it clear that no bacterium need be feared where an antecedent
bacterium had not found lodgment; Listerism in surgery had now
shown how much might be accomplished towards preventing the
access of germs to abraded surfaces of the body and destroying
those that already had found lodgment there. As yet, however,
there was no inkling of a way in which a corresponding onslaught
might be made upon those other germs which find their way into
the animal organism by way of the mouth and the nostrils, and
which, as was now clear, are the cause of those contagious
diseases which, first and last, claim so large a proportion of
mankind for their victims. How such means might be found now
became the anxious thought of every imaginative physician, of
every working microbiologist.
As it happened, the world was not kept long in suspense. Almost
before the proposition had taken shape in the minds of the other
leaders, Pasteur had found a solution. Guided by the empirical
success of Jenner, he, like many others, had long practised
inoculation experiments, and on February 9, 1880, he announced to
the French Academy of Sciences that he had found a method of so
reducing the virulence of a disease germ that when introduced
into the system of a susceptible animal it produced only a mild
form of the disease, which, however, sufficed to protect against
the usual virulent form exactly as vaccinia protects against
smallpox. The particular disease experimented with was that
infectious malady of poultry known familiarly as “chicken
cholera.” In October of the same year Pasteur announced the
method by which this “attenuation of the virus,” as he termed it,
had been brought about—by cultivation of the disease germs in
artificial media, exposed to the air, and he did not hesitate to
assert his belief that the method would prove “susceptible of
generalization”—that is to say, of application to other diseases
than the particular one in question.
Within a few months he made good this prophecy, for in February,
1881, he announced to the Academy that with the aid, as before,
of his associates MM. Chamberland and Roux, he had produced an
attenuated virus of the anthrax microbe by the use of which, as
he affirmed with great confidence, he could protect sheep, and
presumably cattle, against that fatal malady. “In some recent
publications,” said Pasteur, “I announced the first case of the
attenuation of a virus by experimental methods only. Formed of a
special microbe of an extreme minuteness, this virus may be
multiplied by artificial culture outside the animal body. These
cultures, left alone without any possible external contamination,
undergo, in the course of time, modifications of their virulency
to a greater or less extent. The oxygen of the atmosphere is
said to be the chief cause of these attenuations—that is, this
lessening of the facilities of multiplication of the microbe; for
it is evident that the difference of virulence is in some way
associated with differences of development in the parasitic
economy.
“There is no need to insist upon the interesting character of
these results and the deductions to be made therefrom. To seek to
lessen the virulence by rational means would be to establish,
upon an experimental basis, the hope of preparing from an active
virus, easily cultivated either in the human or animal body, a
vaccine-virus of restrained development capable of preventing the
fatal effects of the former. Therefore, we have applied all our
energies to investigate the possible generalizing action of
atmospheric oxygen in the attenuation of virus.
“The anthrax virus, being one that has been most carefully
studied, seemed to be the first that should attract our
attention. Every time, however, we encountered a difficulty.
Between the microbe of chicken cholera and the microbe of anthrax
there exists an essential difference which does not allow the new
experiment to be verified by the old. The microbes of chicken
cholera do not, in effect, seem to resolve themselves, in their
culture, into veritable germs. The latter are merely cells, or
articulations always ready to multiply by division, except when
the particular conditions in which they become true germs are
known.
“The yeast of beer is a striking example of these cellular
productions, being able to multiply themselves indefinitely
without the apparition
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