“It is true,” he wrote to Sédillot, “that μιχρόβιος and μαχρόβιος probably mean in Greek short-lived and long-lived. But, as you justly remark, the question is not what is most purely Greek, but what is the use made in our language of the Greek roots. Now the Greek has βίος, life, βιοῦν, to live, βιούς, living, the root of which may very well figure under the form of bi, bia with the sense living, in aërobia, anaërobia and microbe. I should advise you not to trouble to answer criticisms, but let the word stand for itself, which it will no doubt do.” Pasteur, by adopting it, made the whole world familiar with it.
Though during that month of March, 1878, Pasteur had had the pleasure of hearing Sédillot’s prophetic words at the Académie des Sciences, he had heard very different language at the Académie de Médecine. Colin of Alfort, from the isolated corner where he indulged in this misanthropy, had renewed his criticisms of Pasteur. As he spoke unceasingly of a state of virulent anthrax devoid of bacteridia, Pasteur, losing patience, begged of the Académie to nominate a Commission of Arbitration.
“I desire expressly that M. Colin should be urged to demonstrate what he states to be the fact, for his assertion implies another, which is that an organic matter, containing neither bacteridia nor germs of bacteridia, produces within the body of a living animal the bacteridia of anthrax. This would be the spontaneous generation of the bacillus anthracis!”
Colin’s antagonism to Pasteur was such that he contradicted him in every point and on every subject. Pasteur having stated that birds, and notably hens, did not take the charbon disease, Colin had hastened to say that nothing was easier than to give anthrax to hens; this was in July, 1877. Pasteur, who was at that moment sending Colin some samples of bacteridia culture which he had promised him, begged that he would kindly bring him in exchange a hen suffering from that disease, since it could contract it so easily.
Pasteur told the story of this episode in March, 1878; it was an amusing interlude in the midst of those technical discussions. “At the end of the week, I saw M. Colin coming into my laboratory, and, even before I shook hands with him, I said to him: ‘Why, you have not brought me that diseased hen?’—‘Trust me,’ answered M. Colin, ‘you shall have it next week.’—I left for the vacation; on my return, and at the first meeting of the Academy which I attended, I went to M. Colin and said, ‘Well, where is my dying hen?’ ‘I have only just begun experimenting again,’ said M. Colin; ‘in a few days I will bring you a hen suffering from charbon.’—Days and weeks went by, with fresh insistence on my part and new promises from M. Colin. One day, about two months ago, M. Colin owned to me that he had been mistaken, and that it was impossible to give anthrax to a hen. ‘Well, my dear colleague,’ I said to him, ‘I will show you that it is possible to give anthrax to hens; in fact, I will one day myself bring you at Alfort a hen which shall die of charbon.’
“I have told the Academy this story of the hen M. Colin had promised in order to show that our colleague’s contradiction of our observations on charbon had never been very serious.”
Colin, after speaking about several other things, ended by saying: “I regret that I have not until now been able to hand to M. Pasteur a hen dying or dead of anthrax. The two that I had bought for that purpose were inoculated several times with very active blood, but neither of them has fallen ill. Perhaps the experiment might have succeeded afterwards, but, one fine day, a greedy dog prevented that by eating up the two birds, whose cage had probably been badly closed.” On the Tuesday which followed this incident, the passers-by were somewhat surprised to see Pasteur emerging from the Ecole Normale, carrying a cage, within which were three hens, one of them dead. Thus laden, he took a fiacre, and drove to the Académie de Médecine, where, on arriving, he deposited this unexpected object on the desk. He explained that the dead hen had been inoculated with charbon two days before, at twelve o’clock on the Sunday, with five drops of yeast water employed as a nutritive liquid for pure bacteridium germs, and that it had died on the Monday at five o’clock, twenty-nine hours after the inoculation. He also explained, in his own name, and in the names of Messrs. Joubert and Chamberland, how in the presence of the curious fact that hens were refractory to charbon, it had occurred to them to see whether that singular and hitherto mysterious preservation did not have its cause in the temperature of a hen’s body, “higher by several degrees than the temperature of the body of all the animal species which can be decimated by charbon.”
This preconceived idea was followed by an ingenious experiment. In order to lower the temperature of an inoculated hen’s body, it was kept for some time in a bath, the water covering one-third of its body. When treated in that way, said Pasteur, the hen dies the next day. “All its blood, spleen, lungs, and liver are filled with bacilli anthracis susceptible of ulterior cultures either in inert liquids or in the bodies of animals. We have not met with a single exception.”
As a proof of the success of the experiment, the white hen lay on the floor of the cage. As people might be forthcoming, even at the Academy, who would accuse the prolonged bath of having caused death, one of the two living hens, a gray one, who was extremely lively, had been placed in the same bath, at the same temperature and during the same time. The third one, a black hen, also in perfect health, had been inoculated at the same time as the white hen, with the same liquid, but with ten drops instead of five, to make the comparative result more convincing; it had not been subjected to the bath treatment. “You can see how healthy it is,” said Pasteur; “it is therefore impossible to doubt that the white hen died of charbon; besides, the fact is proved by the bacteridia which fill its body.”
A fourth experiment remained to be tried on a fourth hen, but the Academy of Medicine did not care to hold an all-night sitting. Time lacking, it was only done later, in the laboratory. Could a hen, inoculated of charbon and placed in a bath, recover and be cured merely by being taken out of its bath? A hen was taken, inoculated and held down a prisoner in a bath, its feet fastened to the bottom of the tub, until it was obvious that the disease was in full progress. The hen was then taken out of the water, dried, and wrapped up in cotton wool and placed in a temperature of 35° C. The bacteridia were reabsorbed by the blood, and the hen recovered completely.