Louis Pasteur: His Life and Labours

by René Vallery-Radot

I.

As Pasteur advanced in these studies, he found at the Academy of Medicine some fellow labourers, who being keenly interested in such researches did all they could to promote them. Thus M. Villemin, the chief medical officer of the Val de Grâce (who had with so much sagacity discovered the contagion of tuberculosis) when typhoid fever was raging in Paris two years ago, never allowed a case of the fever to pass through his hands without informing Pasteur, who habitually went himself to collect specimens of the blood of those who had died. How numerous were the drops of blood thus enclosed in little tubes, and how frequent the attempts at cultivation, as yet without result, in the hope of finding the cause of a disease which claims so many victims! There is another malady to which Dr. Hervieux especially called Pasteur's attention, and by which so many women are attacked—puerperal fever. He went with M. Hervieux to the Maternity Hospital, to visit a woman under his charge who had contracted puerperal fever some days after her confinement. By means of a pin a prick was made in the forefinger of the left hand, which had been washed previously with dilute alcohol and carbolic acid, and dried with singed linen. The drop of blood taken in this way was sown in an infusion of fowl. For some days the cultivation remained sterile. Next day blood was taken from a fresh puncture, and this time it proved fertile. The woman died three days after. The blood, therefore, already at the time when Pasteur had taken it, three days at least before death, contained a microscopic parasite capable of cultivation. Eighteen hours before this woman died, some blood taken from the left foot had been sown, and, like the former, it had proved productive; but—and this fact deserves to be noted—while the first productive cultivation only contained a microbe resembling that of boils, the other cultivation contained long flexible chaplets clustered together like tangled strings of beads.

At the post-mortem examination of this woman large quantities of pus were found in the peritoneum and the uterus. This pus was sown with all due precaution. Some blood taken from the basilic and femoral veins was likewise sown. It was everywhere easy to recognise the long chaplets in little tangled parcels, and always without admixture of other organisms, except in the cultivation of the peritoneal pus, which, besides the long strings of grains, showed also the little pyogenic vibrios to which Pasteur had already assigned the name of the pus organism.

From the Maternity Hospital Pasteur went to the Hôpital Lariboisière, where he had been informed that another woman had just died of the same fever. From a puncture in the peritoneum he collected some pus which was found there in great abundance. He sowed this, as well as some blood taken from a vein in the arm. The culture of the pus furnished the long strings of grains and the little pyogenic vibrio. The culture of the blood exhibited only the long strings quite pure.

Pasteur made many other observations of the same kind in cases of puerperal fever. He arrived at the conclusion that, under the name of puerperal fever, diseases of different symptoms were classed, but which all appear to be the result of the invasion of common organisms, which develop themselves on the surface of wounded parts, and from thence spread themselves, in one form or another, by the medium of the blood or of the lymphatics, over different parts of the body. Here the various morbid symptoms are determined by the nature of the parasite and the general constitution of the patient. Pasteur is convinced that, with the possible exception of cases where, by the presence either of internal or external abscesses, the body, before confinement, contains microscopic organisms, the antiseptic treatment ought to be infallible in preventing puerperal fever from declaring itself. The employment of carbolic acid may be of great service; but its smell, and often the melancholy association of ideas which it awakens, might render it unsuitable for women in labour. There is not the same objection to concentrated solutions of boric acid, which, at the ordinary temperature, contain from thirty to forty grammes of acid to one litre of water.

'Would it not be very useful,' said Pasteur one day, when developing his ideas and observations before the Academy of Sciences, 'to place always by the bedside of each patient the concentrated and warm solution of boric acid, with compresses to be very frequently renewed, after having been soaked in the solution, these applications being begun immediately after the confinement? It would also be prudent, before using the compresses, to put them into a hot-air stove, at a temperature of 150 degrees, which is more than sufficient to kill all the germs of common organisms.

'I have,' he added, 'represented the facts as they have appeared to me, and I have hazarded the interpretation of them; but I do not disguise from myself that, in the domain of medicine, it is difficult to withdraw oneself entirely from a pre-existing subjective bias; neither do I forget that the medical and veterinary studies are foreign to myself: therefore I earnestly desire judgment and criticism. While I am little tolerant of frivolous contradiction or of prejudice, despising as I do that vulgar scepticism which would erect doubt into a system, I honour that militant scepticism which makes doubt the basis of a method, whose motto is "More light."'

Since these ideas have penetrated further into practice; puerperal fever, I was told lately by a distinguished medical man, is hardly known in the Maternity Hospital. The employment of a solution of one to a thousandth of corrosive sublimate, which is one of the best antiseptics, gives excellent results, and keeps off all danger. May it not be permitted to hope that puerperal fever will soon disappear in the same way that purulent infection has disappeared in hospitals, since the introduction of Lister's dressings?