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 SURGERY
Meantime, 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 INOCULATION