“Let me tell you frankly that you have not sufficiently imbibed the teaching contained in the papers I have read, in my own name and in that of M. Joubert, at the Académie des Sciences and at the Academy of Medicine. Can you believe that I should have read those papers if they had wanted the confirmation you mention, or if M. Colin’s contradictions could have touched them? You know what my situation is, in these grave controversies; you know that, ignorant as I am of medical and veterinary knowledge, I should immediately be taxed with presumption if I had the boldness to speak without being armed for struggle and for victory! All of you, physicians and veterinary surgeons, would quite reasonably fall upon me if I brought into your debates a mere semblance of proof.
“How is it that you have not noticed that M. Colin has travestied—I should even say suppressed—because it hindered his theory, the important experiment of the successive cultures of the bacteridium in urine?
“If a drop of blood, infected with anthrax, is mixed with water, with pure blood or with humour from the eye, as was done by Davaine, Koch and M. Colin himself, and some of that mixture is inoculated and death ensues, doubt may remain in the mind as to the cause of virulence, especially since Davaine’s well-known experiments on septicæmia. Our experiment is very different....”
And Pasteur showed how, from one artificial culture to another, he reached the fiftieth, the hundredth, and how a drop of this hundredth culture, identical with the first, could bring about death as certainly as a drop of infected blood.
Months passed, and—as Pasteur used to wish in his youth that it might be—few passed without showing one step forward. In a private letter to his old Arbois school-fellow, Jules Vercel, he wrote (February 11, 1878): “I am extremely busy; at no epoch of my scientific life have I worked so hard or been so much interested in the results of my researches, which will, I hope, throw a new and a great light on certain very important branches of medicine and of surgery.”
In the face of those successive discoveries, every one had a word to say. This accumulation of facts was looked down upon by that category of people who borrow assurance from a mixture of ignorance and prejudice. Others, on the other hand, amongst whom the greatest were to be found, proclaimed that Pasteur’s work was immortal and that the word “theory” used by him should be changed into that of “doctrine.” One of those who thus spoke, with the right given by full knowledge, was Dr. Sédillot, whose open and critical mind had kept him from becoming like the old men described by Sainte Beuve as stopping their watch at a given time and refusing to recognize further progress. He was formerly Director of the Army Medical School at Strasburg, and had already retired in 1870, but had joined the army again as volunteer surgeon. It will be remembered that he had written from the Hagueneau ambulance to the Académie des Sciences—of which he was a corresponding member—to call the attention of his colleagues to the horrors of purulent infection, which defied his zeal and devotion.
No one followed Pasteur’s work with greater attention than this tall, sad-looking old man of seventy-four; he was one of those who had been torn away from his native Alsace, and he could not get over it. In March, 1878, he read a paper to the Academy, entitled “On the Influence of M. Pasteur’s Work on Medicine and Surgery.”
Those discoveries, he said, which had deeply modified the state of surgery, and particularly the treatment of wounds, could be traced back to one principle. This principle was applicable to various facts, and explained Lister’s success, and the fact that certain operations had become possible, and that certain cases, formerly considered hopeless, were now being recorded on all sides. Real progress lay there. Sédillot’s concluding paragraph deserves to be handed down as a comment precious from a contemporary: “We shall have seen the conception and birth of a new surgery, a daughter of Science and of Art, which will be one of the greatest wonders of our century, and with which the names of Pasteur and Lister will remain gloriously connected.”
In that treatise, Sédillot invented a new word to characterize all that body of organisms and infinitely small vibriones, bacteria, bacteridia, etc.; he proposed to designate them all under the generic term of microbe. This word had, in Sédillot’s eyes, the advantage of being short and of having a general signification. He however felt some scruple before using it, and consulted Littré, who replied on February 26, 1878: “Dear colleague and friend, microbe and microbia are very good words. To designate the animalculæe I should give the preference to microbe, because, as you say, it is short, and because it leaves microbia, a feminine noun, for the designation of the state of a microbe.”
Certain philologists criticized the formation of the word in the name of the Greek language. Microbe, they said, means an animal with a short life, rather than an infinitesimally small animal. Littré gave a second testimonial to the word microbe—