Metchnikoff's experience was similar. He was as a zoölogist less interested in man than in the invertebrates, devoting his time to the study of the minuter forms of life on the barren steppes of Russia and in Mediterranean waters. It was in Italy at Messina in 1882 that he made the discovery which led him to fame as one of the benefactors of the human race. Now, if a man should deliberately set out for such a goal, if he should be incited by egotism to become famous, or inspired by altruism to relieve the suffering of humanity, about the last thing he would try would be to sit down in a laboratory all day with his eye glued to a microscope watching the blood corpuscles chase each other through the veins of an infant starfish. But since Metchnikoff was less influenced by the two motives mentioned than he was by a desire for truth for its own sake and regardless of consequences, all these things have been added unto him. If the anti-vivisectionists had their way about it, experimentation in animals, if allowed at all, would be restricted to physicians and to the specific purpose of curing disease. This, however, would be one of the surest ways to check medical progress, for the advancement of a science ordinarily owes little to those who are professionally engaged in its practice or have their eyes focused upon some practical result of their investigations. At least the world may rejoice that through the liberality of French law the work of these two men has never been hampered—Pasteur, who discovered the cause of disease, and Metchnikoff, who discovered the cause of immunity. These are two cornerstones of the foundation on which is now being erected the structure of a rational system of hygiene the purpose of which is to prolong human life by the elimination of disease rather than by its cure. The change that is taking place in medicine is analogous to that taking place in philanthropy. The modern philanthropist appears cold-hearted because, instead of dropping a coin into a beggar's hat, as did the charitable in former days, he devotes himself to a systematic study of the causes of poverty. The modern medical man is likewise misunderstood if he seems indifferent to the suffering around him and is absorbed in the investigation of remote biological problems having no perceptible relation to human needs. But the beneficial results of the scientific method in both philanthropy and medicine are already sufficiently apparent to enable us to see that it will do much more for humanity than the kind but blind benevolence of the past.
The fame of France in art, literature, and science is in large part her reward for her hospitality in giving to men of other lands the freedom and encouragement which they could not find at home. One example is Maeterlinck. Another is Metchnikoff. He left his native country chiefly because of a difference of opinion on political questions between himself and the Czar. Not that he has ever been a revolutionist, but as a Jew by race, an atheist in religion, and a liberal in politics, he was triply obnoxious to the powers that be, and after the assassination of Alexander II in 1881, the students were too much excited over politics to attend to their studies. So he resigned his professorship in the University of Odessa and went abroad to devote himself to biological research.
He was born in the Province of Kharkov, Little Russia, May 15, 1845. His father was an officer of the Guards, afterward a general. His mother was a Jewess, and it was from her that he derived the love for science which early manifested itself. He won a gold medal in the high school of Kharkov and passed through the university of that city in two years instead of the customary four. Then he went to Germany and studied at Giessen, Göttingen, and Munich. Returning to his native land, he taught in the University of St. Petersburg and in 1870 went to Odessa to take the chair of zoölogy in the university there.
The years spent in private study, chiefly at Messina, the earthquake city of Sicily, were most fruitful, for his investigation of intercellular digestion in minute marine invertebrates gave him the clew to the protective action of the blood in the higher animals and man, and in 1884 he outlined his theory of inflammation, which was, in short, that the congestion of blood at a wound was due to the efforts of the leucocytes or white blood cells to overpower the invading microbes. The value of this discovery was recognized immediately by the two foremost authorities in biology: Virchow, the German, who had discovered the leucocytes, and Pasteur, the Frenchman, who had discovered the microbes. Metchnikoff had now found the missing link which brought these two discoveries together and showed their meaning.
In 1888 Metchnikoff was called to the Pasteur Institute, and in 1895 became its director. Here he found an exceptional opportunity to devote his talents to the relief of suffering humanity. Such institutions for the advancement of the science of medicine have since been established elsewhere: the Institute for Experimental Therapeutics in Frankfort-on-the-Main, the Cancer Research Laboratory of London, the Rockefeller Institute in New York, for example; but the French people were the first to respond to the need of the man they have delighted to honor by endowing, in 1886, an institution which should continue his work as well as perpetuate his name. The Nobel prize for the most important discovery in medicine was in 1908 divided between Metchnikoff, of the Pasteur Institute, and Professor Paul Ehrlich, of the Frankfort Institute, who has in these latter days made "606" the mark of the beast, instead of 666, as prophesied in Revelation. The Nobel prize man of 1912, Doctor Alexis Carrel, although a Frenchman by birth, found in the Rockefeller Institute the opportunity to carry on his remarkable investigations on the preservation and transplantation of living tissues.
Characteristically French is the artistic setting which has been given to this home of science. The visitor appropriately approaches it through the long and handsome Boulevard Pasteur, then turning into a side street he finds on his left the Pasteur Institute and on his right the more imposing buildings of the Institute for Infectious Diseases and the Laboratory of Biological Chemistry, recently erected for carrying out the treatment which the experimental work of the other side of the street has suggested. A new department has been added for the study of tropical diseases such as the sleeping sickness, which has depopulated a large part of the Nyanza region. This extension of the work is made possible by the receipt in 1909 of the bequest of eight million dollars by the miserly and eccentric Jewish banker who called himself Osiris.
As the visitor passes into the courtyard of the Institute, his nerves already shaky with thoughts of microbes and mad dogs, he is almost startled to see, half hidden among the trees, a man engaged in a death struggle with a wolf. This is a bronze statue of Jupile, a shepherd who, bitten by a mad wolf, was one of the first patients to receive the Pasteur treatment for rabies. In a crypt of marble and mosaic underneath the building is the tomb of Pasteur, as impressive, if less imposing, than the tomb of Napoleon under the dome of the Invalides not far away. The reception room of the Institute is adorned with large paintings showing the modern miracles of healing, better authenticated than those of Sainte Geneviève depicted by Puvis de Chavannes on the walls of the Panthéon.
Professor Metchnikoff is ordinarily not accessible to visitors, especially interviewers, but since I was armed with a letter of introduction from Professor Jacques Loeb, of the Rockefeller Institute, whom he regards as the foremost of American scientists, I was fortunate enough to find him in.