The life of Pasteur

by René Vallery-Radot

Though the director of the Turin Veterinary School affirmed that the blood had been carefully examined and that it was in no wise septic, Pasteur looked back on his 1877 experiments on anthrax and septicæmia, and maintained before the Paris Central Veterinary Society on June 8, 1882, that the Turin School had done wrong in using the blood of an animal at least twenty-four hours after its death, for the blood must have been septic besides containing anthrax. The six professors of the Turin School protested unanimously against such an interpretation. “We hold it marvellous,” they wrote ironically, “that your Illustrious Lordship should have recognized so surely, from Paris, the disease which made such havoc amongst the animals vaccinated and non-vaccinated and inoculated with blood containing anthrax in our school on March 23, 1882.

“It does not seem to us possible that a scientist should affirm the existence of septicæmia in an animal he has not even seen....”

The quarrel with the Turin School had now lasted a year. On April 9, 1883, Pasteur appealed to the Academy of Sciences to judge of the Turin incident and to put an end to this agitation, which threatened to cover truth with a veil. He read out the letter he had just addressed to the Turin professors.

“Gentlemen, a dispute having arisen between you and myself respecting the interpretation to be given to the absolute failure of your control experiment of March 23, 1882, I have the honour to inform you that, if you will accept the suggestion, I will go to Turin any day you may choose; you shall inoculate in my presence some virulent charbon into any number of sheep you like. The exact moment of death in each case shall be determined, and I will demonstrate to you that in every case the blood of the corpse containing only charbon at the first will also be septic on the next day. It will thus be established with absolute certainty that the assertion formulated by me on June 8, 1882, against which you have protested on two occasions, arises, not as you say, from an arbitrary opinion, but from an immovable scientific principle; and that I have legitimately affirmed from Paris the presence of septicæmia without it being in the least necessary that I should have seen the corpse of the sheep you utilized for your experiments.

“Minutes of the facts as they are produced shall be drawn up day by day, and signed by the professors of the Turin Veterinary School and by the other persons, physicians or veterinary surgeons, who may have been present at the experiments; these minutes will then be published both at the Academies of Turin and of Paris.”

Pasteur contented himself with reading this letter to the Academy of Sciences. For months he had not attended the Academy of Medicine; he was tired of incessant and barren struggles; he often used to come away from the discussions worn out and excited. He would say to Messrs. Chamberland and Roux, who waited for him after the meetings, “How is it that certain doctors do not understand the range, the value, of our experiments? How is it that they do not foresee the great future of all these studies?”

The day after the Académie des Sciences meeting, judging that his letter to Turin sufficiently closed the incident, Pasteur started for Arbois. He wanted to set up a laboratory adjoining his house. Where the father had worked with his hands, the son would work at his great light-emitting studies.

On April 3 a letter from M. Peter had been read at the Academy of Medicine, declaring that he did not give up the struggle and that nothing would be lost by waiting.

At the following sitting, another physician, M. Fauvel, while declaring himself an admirer of Pasteur’s work and full of respect for his person, thought it well not to accept blindly all the inductions into which Pasteur might find himself drawn, and to oppose those which were contradictory to acquired facts. After M. Fauvel, M. Peter violently attacked what he called “microbicidal drugs which may become homicidal,” he said. When reading the account of this meeting, Pasteur had an impulse of anger. His resolutions not to return to the Academy of Medicine gave way before the desire not to leave Bouley alone to lead the defensive campaign; he started for Paris.

As his family was then at Arbois, and the doors of his flat at the Ecole Normale closed, the simplest thing for Pasteur was to go to the Hôtel du Louvre, accompanied by a member of his family. The next morning he carefully prepared his speech, and, at three o’clock in the afternoon, he entered the Academy of Medicine. The President, M. Hardy, welcomed him in these words—“Allow me, before you begin to speak, to tell you that it is with great pleasure that we see you once again among us, and that the Academy hopes that, now that you have once more found your way to its precincts, you will not forget it again.”