From Villefranche we went to Trieste, where Metchnikoff studied star-fish and filled the lacunæ in his researches on the origin of the mesoderm.
In a medical review which he read at Trieste, he found the first account of his phagocyte theory; it was an unfavourable and hostile criticism by a German scientist of the name of Baumgarten, endeavouring to prove that Metchnikoff’s deductions were inadmissible. This grieved and pained him very much, but he immediately recovered himself and strongly determined to study the medical side of the question in order to prove on that ground that his theory was well-founded.
[CHAPTER XX]
A Bacteriological Institute in Odessa — Unsatisfactory conditions — Experiments on erysipelas and on relapsing fever.
The results of Pasteur’s antirabic inoculations were published in 1885. The Municipality of Odessa, desirous of founding a bacteriological station in that town, sent Dr. Gamaléia to Paris to study the new method. Metchnikoff was appointed Scientific Director of the new institution, and Drs. Gamaléia and Bardach, former pupils of his, were entrusted with the preparation of vaccines and preventive inoculations. The Institute, opened in 1886, was founded at the expense of the Municipality of Odessa and of the Zemstvo of the Kherson Province.
Metchnikoff himself describes as follows the short time he spent in that Institute:
... Having given up my State work, I placed myself at the service of the city and the Zemstvo.
Absorbed as I was by the scientific part of the work, I confided to my young colleagues the practical part, i.e. the vaccinations and the perfection of vaccines.