The life of Pasteur

by René Vallery-Radot

Tarnier, who took Trélat’s place at the Maternité, in 1867, had been for eleven years so convinced of the infectious nature of puerperal fever that he thought but of arresting the evil by every possible means of defence, the first of which seemed to him isolation of the patients.

In 1874, Dr. Budin, then walking the hospitals, had noted in Edinburgh the improvement due to antisepsis, thanks to Lister. Three or four years later, in 1877 and 1878, after having seen that, in the various maternity hospitals of Holland, Germany, Austria, Russia and Denmark, antisepsis was practised with success, he brought his impressions with him to Paris. Tarnier hastened to employ carbolic acid at the Maternité with excellent results, and his assistant, M. Bar, tried sublimate. While that new period of victory over fatal cases was beginning, Pasteur came to the Académie de Médecine, having found, in certain puerperal infections, a microbe in the shape of a chain or chaplet, which lent itself very well to culture.

“Pasteur,” wrote M. Roux, “does not hesitate to declare that that microscopic organism is the most frequent cause of infection in recently delivered women. One day, in a discussion on puerperal fever at the Academy, one of his most weighty colleagues was eloquently enlarging upon the causes of epidemics in lying-in hospitals; Pasteur interrupted him from his place. ‘None of those things cause the epidemic; it is the nursing and medical staff who carry the microbe from an infected woman to a healthy one.’ And as the orator replied that he feared that microbe would never be found, Pasteur went to the blackboard and drew a diagram of the chain-like organism, saying: ‘There, that is what it is like!’ His conviction was so deep that he could not help expressing it forcibly. It would be impossible now to picture the state of surprise and stupefaction into which he would send the students and doctors in hospitals, when, with an assurance and simplicity almost disconcerting in a man who was entering a lying-in ward for the first time, he criticized the appliances, and declared that all the linen should be put into a sterilizing stove.”

Pasteur was not satisfied with offering advice and criticism, making for himself irreconcilable enemies amongst those who were more desirous of personal distinction than of the progress of Science. In order the better to convince those who still doubted, he affirmed that, in a badly infected patient—what he usually and sorrowfully called an invaded patient—he could bring the microbe into evidence by a simple pin prick on the finger tip of the unhappy woman doomed to die the next day.

“And he did so,” writes M. Roux. “In spite of the tyranny of medical education which weighed down the public mind, some students were attracted, and came to the laboratory to examine more closely those matters, which allowed of such precise diagnosis and such confident prognosis.”

What struggles, what efforts, were necessary before it could be instilled into every mind that a constant watch must be kept in the presence of those invisible foes, ready to invade the human body through the least scratch—that surgeons, dressers and nurses may become causes of infection and propagators of death through forgetfulness! and before the theory of germs and the all powerfulness of microbes could be put under a full light à propos of that discussion on puerperal fever!

But Pasteur was supported and inspired during that period, perhaps the most fruitful of his existence, by the prescience that those notions meant the salvation of human lives, and that mothers need no longer be torn by death from the cradle of their new-born infants.

“I shall force them to see; they will have to see!” he repeated with a holy wrath against doctors who continued to talk, from their study or at their clubs, with some scepticism, of those newly discovered little creatures, of those ultra-microscopic parasites, trying to moderate enthusiasm and even confidence.

An experimental fact which occurred about that time was followed with interest, not only by the Académie des Sciences, but by the general public, whose attention was beginning to be awakened. A professor at the Nancy Faculty, M. Feltz, had announced to the Académie des Sciences in March, 1879, that, in the blood abstracted from a woman, who had died at the Nancy Hospital of puerperal fever, he had found motionless filaments, simple or articulated, transparent, straight or curved, which belonged, he said, to the genus leptothrix. Pasteur, who in his studies on puerperal fever had seen nothing of the kind, wrote to Dr. Feltz, asking him to send him a few drops of that infected blood. After receiving and examining the sample, Pasteur hastened to inform M. Feltz that that leptothrix was no other than the bacillus anthracis. M. Feltz, much surprised and perplexed, declared himself ready to own his error and to proclaim it if he were convinced by examining blood infected by charbon, and which, he said, he should collect wherever he could find it. Pasteur desired to save him that trouble, and offered to send him three little guinea-pigs alive, but inoculated, the one with the deceased woman’s blood, the other with the bacteridia of charbon-infected blood from Chartres, the third with some charbon-infected blood from a Jura cow.

The three rodents were inoculated on May 12, at three o’clock in the afternoon, and arrived, living, at Nancy, on the morning of the thirteenth. They died on the fourteenth, in the laboratory of M. Feltz, who was thus able to observe them with particular attention until their death.