Pasteur put forward, in response, a report from the veterinary surgeon Boutet to the Chartres Veterinary and Agricultural School, made in the preceding October. The sheep vaccinated in Eure et Loir during the last year formed a total of 79,392. Instead of a mortality which had been more than nine per cent, on the average in the last ten years, the mortality had only been 518 sheep, much less than one per cent; 5,700 sheep had therefore been preserved by vaccination. Amongst cattle 4,562 animals had been vaccinated; out of a similar number 300 usually died every year. Since vaccination, only eleven cows had died.
“Such results appear to us convincing,” wrote M. Boutet. “If our cultivators of the Beauce understand their own interest, splenic fever and malignant pustules will soon remain a mere memory, for charbon diseases never are spontaneous, and, by preventing the death of their cattle by vaccination, they will destroy all possibility of propagation of that terrible disease, which will in consequence entirely disappear.”
Koch continued to smile at the discovery on the earthworms’ action in the etiology of anthrax. “You are mistaken, Sir,” replied Pasteur. “You are again preparing for yourself a vexing change of opinion.” And he concluded as follows: “However violent your attacks, Sir, they will not hinder the success of the method of attenuated virus. I am confidently awaiting the consequences which it holds in reserve to help humanity in its struggle against the diseases which assault it.”
This debate was hardly concluded when new polemics arose at the Académie de Médecine. A new treatment of typhoid fever was under discussion.
In 1870, M. Glénard, a Lyons medical student, who had enlisted, was, with many others, taken to Stettin as prisoner of war. A German physician, Dr. Brand, moved with compassion by the sufferings of the vanquished French soldiers, showed them great kindness and devotion. The French student attached himself to him, helped him with his work, and saw him treat typhoid fever with success by baths at 20° C. Brand prided himself on this cold-bath treatment, which produced numerous cures. M. Glénard, on his return to Lyons, remembering with confidence this method of which he had seen the excellent results, persuaded the physician of the Croix Rousse hospital, where he resided, to attempt the same treatment. This was done for ten years, and nearly all the Lyons practitioners became convinced that Brand’s method was efficacious. M. Glénard came to Paris and read to the Academy of Medicine a paper on the cold-bath treatment of typhoid fever. The Academy appointed a commission, composed of civil and military physicians, and the discussion was opened.
The oratorical display which had struck Pasteur when he first came to the Académie de Médecine was much to the fore on that occasion; the merely curious hearers of that discussion had an opportunity of enjoying medical eloquence, besides acquiring information on the new treatment of typhoid fever. There were some vehement denunciations of the microbe which was suspected in typhoid fever. “You aim at the microbe and you bring down the patient!” exclaimed one of the orators, who added, amidst great applause, that it was time “to offer an impassable barrier to such adventurous boldness and thus to preserve patients from the unforeseen dangers of that therapeutic whirlwind!”
Another orator took up a lighter tone: “I do not much believe in that invasion of parasites which threatens us like an eleventh plague of Egypt,” said M. Peter. And attacking the scientists who meddled with medicine, chymiasters as he called them, “They have come to this,” he said, “that in typhoid fevers they only see the typhoid fever, in typhoid fever, fever only, and in fever, increased heat. They have thus reached that luminous idea that heat must be fought by cold. This organism is on fire, let us pour water over it; it is a fireman’s doctrine.”
Vulpian, whose grave mind was not unlike Pasteur’s, intervened, and said that new attempts should not be discouraged by sneers. Without pronouncing on the merits of the cold-bath method, which he had not tried, he looked beyond this discussion, indicating the road which theoretically seemed to him to lead to a curative treatment. The first thing was to discover the agent which causes typhoid fever, and then, when that was known, attempt to destroy or paralyse it in the tissues of typhoid patients, or else to find drugs capable either of preventing the aggressions of that agent or of annihilating the effects of that aggression, “to produce, relatively to typhoid fever, the effect determined by salicylate of soda in acute rheumatism of the articulations.”
Beyond the restricted audience, allowed a few seats in the Académie de Médecine, the general public itself was taking an interest in this prolonged debate. The very high death rate in the army due to typhoid fever was the cause of this eager attention. Whilst the German army, where Brand’s method was employed, hardly lost five men out of a thousand, the French army lost more than ten per thousand.
Whilst military service was not compulsory, epidemics in barracks were looked upon with more or less compassionate attention. But the thought that typhoid fever had been more destructive within the last ten years than the most sanguinary battle now awakened all minds and hearts. Is then personal fear necessary to awaken human compassion?