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We now approach an aspect of this question which concerns us still more closely, and will be best illustrated by an actual fact. A few years ago I was bathing in an Alpine stream, and returning to my clothes from the cascade which had been my shower-bath, I slipped upon a block of granite, the sharp crystals of which stamped themselves into my naked shin. The wound was an awkward one, but being in vigorous health at the time, I hoped for a speedy recovery. Dipping a clean pocket-handkerchief into the stream, I wrapped it round the wound, limped home, and remained for four or five days quietly in bed. There was no pain, and at the end of this time I thought myself quite fit to quit my room. The wound, when uncovered, was found perfectly clean, uninflamed, and entirely free from matter. Placing over it a bit of goldbeater's-skin, I walked about all day. Towards evening itching and heat were felt; a large accumulation of matter followed, and I was forced to go to bed again. The water-bandage was restored, but it was powerless to check the action now set up; arnica was applied, but it made matters worse. The inflammation increased alarmingly, until finally I had to be carried on men's shoulders down the mountain and transported to Geneva, where, thanks to the kindness of friends, I was immediately placed in the best medical hands. On the morning after my arrival in Geneva, Dr. Gautier discovered an abscess in my instep, at a distance of five inches from the wound. The two were connected by a channel, or sinus, as it is technically called, through which he was able to empty the abscess, without the application of the lance.
By what agency was that channel formed — what was it that thus tore asunder the sound tissue of my instep, and kept me for six weeks a prisoner in bed? In the very room where the water dressing had been removed from my wound and the goldbeater's-skin applied to it, I opened this year a number of tubes, containing perfectly clear and sweet infusions of fish, flesh, and vegetable. These hermetically sealed infusions had been exposed for weeks, both to the sun of the Alps and to the warmth of a kitchen, without showing the slightest turbidity or sign of life. But two days after they were opened the greater number of them swarmed with the bacteria of putrefaction, the germs of which had been contracted from the dust-laden air of the room. And had the matter from my abscess been examined, my memory of its appearance leads me to infer that it would have been found equally swarming with these bacteria — that it was their germs which got into my incautiously opened wound, and that they were the subtile workers that burrowed down my shin, dug the abscess in my instep, and produced effects which might easily have proved fatal.
This apparent digression brings us face to face with the labours of a man who combines the penetration of the true theorist with the skill and conscientiousness of the true experimenter, and whose practice is one continued demonstration of the theory that the putrefaction of wounds is to be averted by the destruction of the germs of bacteria. Not only from his own reports of his cases, but from the reports of eminent men who have visited his hospital, and from the opinions expressed to me by continental surgeons, do I gather that one of the greatest steps ever made in the art of surgery was the introduction of the antiseptic system of treatment, introduced by Professor Lister.
The interest of this subject does not slacken as we proceed. We began with the cherry-cask and beer-vat; we end with the body of man. There are persons born with the power of interpreting natural facts, as there are others smitten with everlasting incompetence in regard to such interpretation. To the former class in an eminent degree belonged the illustrious philosopher Robert Boyle, whose words in relation to this subject have in them the forecast of prophecy. 'And let me add,' writes Boyle in his 'Essay on the Pathological Part of Physic,' 'that he that thoroughly understands the nature of ferments and fermentations shall probably be much better able than he that ignores them, to give a fair account of divers phenomena of several diseases (as well fevers as others), which will perhaps be never properly understood without an insight into the doctrine of fermentations.'
Two hundred years have passed since these pregnant words were written, and it is only in this our day that men are beginning to fully realise their truth. In the domain of surgery the justice of Boyle's surmise has been most strictly demonstrated. But we now pass the bounds of surgery proper, and enter the domain of epidemic disease, including those fevers so sagaciously referred to by Boyle. The most striking analogy between a contagium and a ferment is to be found in the power of indefinite self-multiplication possessed and exercised by both. You know the exquisitely truthful figures regarding leaven employed in the New Testament. A particle hid in three measures of meal leavens it all. A little leaven leaveneth the whole lump. In a similar manner, a particle of contagium spreads through the human body and may be so multiplied as to strike down whole populations. Consider the effect produced upon the system by a microscopic quantity of the virus of smallpox. That virus is, to all intents and purposes, a seed. It is sown as yeast is sown, it grows and multiplies as yeast grows and multiplies, and it always reproduces itself. To Pasteur we are indebted for a series of masterly researches, wherein he exposes the looseness and general baselessness of prevalent notions regarding the transmutation of one ferment into another. He guards himself against saying it is impossible. The true investigator is sparing in the use of this word, though the use of it is unsparingly ascribed to him; but, as a matter of fact, Pasteur has never, been able to effect the alleged transmutation, while he has been always able to point out the open doorways through which the affirmers of such transmutations had allowed error to march in upon them. [Footnote: 'Those who wish for an illustration of the care necessary in these researches, and of the carelessness with which they have in some cases been conducted, will do well to consult the Rev. W. H. Dallinger's excellent 'Notes on Heterogenesis' in the October number of the Popular Science Review.]
The great source of error here has been already alluded to in this discourse. The observers worked in an atmosphere charged with the germs of different organisms; the mere accident of first possession rendering now one organism, now another, triumphant. In different stages, moreover, of its fermentative or putrefactive changes, the same infusion may so alter as to be successively taken possession of by different organisms. Such cases have been adduced to show that the earlier organisms must have been transformed into the later ones, whereas they are simply cases in which different germs, because of changes in the infusion, render themselves valid at different times.
By teaching us how to cultivate each ferment in its purity — in other words, by teaching us how to rear the individual organism apart from all others, — Pasteur has enabled us to avoid all these errors. And where this isolation of a particular organism has been duly effected it grows and multiplies indefinitely, but no change of it into another organism is ever observed. In Pasteur's researches the Bacterium remained a Bacterium, the Vibrio a Vibrio, the Penicillium a Penicillium, and the Torula a Torula. Sow any of these in a state of purity in an appropriate liquid; you get it, and it alone, in the subsequent crop. In like manner, sow small-pox in the human body, your crop is small-pox. Sow there scarlatina, and your crop is scarlatina. Sow typhoid virus, your crop is typhoid — cholera, your crop is cholera. The disease bears as constant a relation to its contagium as the microscopic organisms just enumerated do to their germs, or indeed as a thistle does to its seed. No wonder then, with analogies so obvious and so striking, that the conviction is spreading and growing daily in strength, that reproductive parasitic life is at the root of epidemic disease — that living ferments finding lodgment in the body increase there and multiply, directly ruining the tissue on which they subsist, or destroying life indirectly by the generation of poisonous compounds within the body. This conclusion, which comes to us with a presumption almost amounting to demonstration, is clinched by the fact that virulently infective diseases have been discovered with which living organisms are as closely and as indissolubly associated as the growth of Torula is with the fermentation of beer.
And here, if you will permit me, I would utter a word of warning to well-meaning people. We have now reached a phase of this question when it is of the very last importance that light should once for all be thrown upon the manner in which contagious and infectious diseases take root and spread. To this end the action of various ferments upon the organs and tissues of the living body must be studied; the habitat of each special organism concerned in the production of each specific disease must be determined, and the mode by which its germs are spread abroad as sources of further infection. It is only by such rigidly accurate enquiries that we can obtain final and complete mastery over these destroyers. Hence, while abhorring cruelty of all kinds, while shrinking sympathetically from all animal suffering — suffering which my own pursuits never call upon me to inflict, — an unbiassed survey of the field of research now opening out before the physiologist causes me to conclude, that no greater calamity could befall the human race than the stoppage of experimental enquiry in this direction. A lady whose philanthropy has rendered her illustrious said to me some time ago, that science was becoming immoral; that the researches of the past, unlike those of the present, were carried on without cruelty. I replied to her that the science of Kepler and Newton, to which she referred, dealt with the laws and phenomena of inorganic nature; but that one great advance made by modern science was in the direction of biology, or the science of life; and that in this new direction scientific enquiry, though at the outset pursued at the cost of some temporary suffering, would in the end prove a thousand times more beneficent than it had ever hitherto been. I said this because I saw that the very researches which the lady deprecated were leading us to such a knowledge of epidemic diseases as will enable us finally to sweep these scourges of the human race from the face of the earth.
This is a point of such capital importance that I should like to bring it home to your intelligence by a single trustworthy illustration. In 1850, two distinguished French observers, MM. Davainne and Rayer, noticed in the blood, of animals which had died of the virulent disease called splenic fever, small microscopic organisms resembling transparent rods, but neither of them at that time attached any significance to the observation. In 1861, Pasteur published a memoir on the fermentation of butyric acid, wherein he described the organism which provoked it; and after reading this memoir it occurred to Davainne that splenic fever might be a case of fermentation set up within the animal body, by the organisms which had been observed by him and Rayer. This idea has been placed beyond all doubt by subsequent research.