“Allow me, before I finish, to tell you another secret. I have hastened, again with the assistance of Messrs. Chamberland and Roux, to verify the extraordinary facts recently announced to the Academy by M. Toussaint, professor at the Toulouse Veterinary School.
“After numerous experiments leaving no room for doubt, I can assure you that M. Toussaint’s interpretations should be gone over again. Neither do I agree with M. Toussaint on the identity which he affirms as existing between acute septicæmia and chicken-cholera; those two diseases differ absolutely.”
Bouley was touched by this temperate language after all the verifying experiments made at the Ecole Normale and in the Jura. When relating the Alfort incidents, and while expressing a hope that some vaccination against anthrax would shortly be discovered, he revealed that Pasteur had had “the delicacy of abstaining from a detailed criticism, so as to leave M. Toussaint the care of checking his own results.”
The struggle against virulent diseases was becoming more and more the capital question for Pasteur. He constantly recurred to the subject, not only in the laboratory, but in his home conversations, for he associated his family with all the preoccupations of his scientific life. Now that the oxygen of air appeared as a modifying influence on the development of a microbe in the body of animals, it seemed possible that there might be a general law applicable to every virus! What a benefit it would be if the vaccine of every virulent disease could thus be discovered! And in his thirst for research, considering that the scientific history of chicken-cholera was more advanced than that of variolic and vaccinal affections—the great fact of vaccination remaining isolated and unexplained—he hastened on his return to Paris (September, 1880) to press physicians on this special point—the relations between small-pox and vaccine. “From the point of view of physiological experimentation,” he said, “the identity of the variola virus with the vaccine virus has never been demonstrated.” When Jules Guérin—a born fighter, still desirous at the age of eighty to measure himself successfully with Pasteur—declared that “human vaccine is the product of animal variola (cow pox and horse pox) inoculated into man and humanised by its successive transmissions on man,” Pasteur answered ironically that he might as well say, “Vaccine is—vaccine.”
Those who were accustomed to speak to Pasteur with absolute sincerity advised him not to let himself be dragged further into those discussions when his adversaries, taking words for ideas, drowned the debate in a flood of phrases. Of what good were such debates to science, since those who took the first place among veterinary surgeons, physicians and surgeons, loudly acknowledged the debt which science owned to Pasteur? Why be surprised that certain minds, deeply disturbed in their habits, their principles, their influence, should feel some difficulty, some anger even in abandoning their ideas? If it is painful to tenants to leave a house in which they have spent their youth, what must it be to break with one’s whole education?
Pasteur, who allowed himself thus to be told that he lacked philosophical serenity, acknowledged this good advice with an affectionate smile. He promised to be calm; but when once in the room, his adversaries’ attacks, their prejudices and insinuations, enervated and irritated him. All his promises were forgotten.
“To pretend to express the relation between human variola and vaccine by speaking but of vaccine and its relations with cow pox and horse pox, without even pronouncing the word small-pox, is mere equivocation, done on purpose to avoid the real point of the debate.” Becoming excited by Guérin’s antagonism, Pasteur turned some of Guérin’s operating processes into ridicule with such effect that Guérin started from his place and rushed at him. The fiery octogenarian was stopped by Baron Larrey; the sitting was suspended in confusion. The following day, Guérin sent two seconds to ask for reparation by arms from Pasteur. Pasteur referred them to M. Béclard, Permanent Secretary to the Académie de Médicine, and M. Bergeron, its Annual Secretary, who were jointly responsible for the Official Bulletin of the Academy. “I am ready,” said Pasteur, “having no right to act otherwise, to modify whatever the editors may consider as going beyond the rights of criticism and legitimate defence.”
In deference to the opinion of Messrs. Béclard and Bergeron, Pasteur consented to terminate the quarrel by writing to the chairman of the Academy that he had no intention of offending a colleague, and that in all discussions of that kind, he never thought of anything but to defend the exactitude of his own work.
The Journal de la Médecine et de la Chimie, edited by M. Lucas-Championnière, said à propos of this very reasonable letter—“We, for our part, admire the meekness of M. Pasteur, who is so often described as combative and ever on the warpath. Here we have a scientist, who now and then makes short, substantial and extremely interesting communications. He is not a medical man, and yet, guided by his genius, he opens new paths across the most arduous studies of medical science. Instead of being offered the tribute of attention and admiration which he deserves, he meets with a raging opposition from some quarrelsome individuals, ever inclined to contradict after listening as little as possible. If he makes use of a scientific expression not understood by everybody, or if he uses a medical expression slightly incorrectly, then rises before him the spectre of endless speeches, intended to prove to him that all was for the best in medical science before it was assisted by the precise studies and resources of chemistry and experimentation.... Indeed, M. Pasteur’s expression of equivocation seemed to us moderate!”
How many such futile incidents, such vain quarrels, traverse the life of a great man! Later on, we only see glory, apotheosis, and the statues in public places; the demi-gods seemed to have marched in triumph towards a grateful posterity. But how many obstacles and oppositions are there to retard the progress of a free mind desirous of bringing his task to a successful conclusion and incited by the fruitful thought of Death, ever present to spirits preoccupied with interests of a superior order? Pasteur looked upon himself as merely a passing guest of those homes of intellect which he wished to enlarge and fortify for those who would come after him.