After isolating and rectifying the points of discussion, Pasteur advised M. Peter to make a more searching inquiry into the subject of anthrax vaccination, and to trust to Time, the only sovereign judge. Should not the recollection of the violent hostility encountered at first by Jenner put people on their guard against hasty judgments? There was not one of the doctors present who could not remember what had been written at one time against vaccination!!!
He went on to oppose the false idea that each science should restrict itself within its own limitations. “What do I, a physician, says M. Peter, want with the minds of the chemist, the physicist and the physiologist?
“On hearing him speak with so much disdain of the chemists and physiologists who touch upon questions of disease, you might verily think that he is speaking in the name of a science whose principles are founded on a rock! Does he want proofs of the slow progress of therapeutics? It is now six months since, in this assembly of the greatest medical men, the question was discussed whether it is better to treat typhoid fever with cold lotions or with quinine, with alcohol or salicylic acid, or even not to treat it at all.
“And, when we are perhaps on the eve of solving the question of the etiology of that disease by a microbe, M. Peter commits the medical blasphemy of saying, ‘What do your microbes matter to me? It will only be one microbe the more!’”
Amazed that sarcasm should be levelled against new studies which opened such wide horizons, he denounced the flippancy with which a professor of the Faculty of Medicine allowed himself to speak of vaccinations by attenuated virus.
He ended by rejoicing once more that this great discovery should have been a French one.
Pasteur went back to Arbois for a few days. On his return to Paris, he was beginning some new experiments, when he received a long letter from the Turin professors. Instead of accepting his offer, they enumerated their experiments, asked some questions in an offended and ironical manner, and concluded by praising an Italian national vaccine, which produced absolute immunity in the future—when it did not kill.
“They cannot get out of this dilemma,” said Pasteur; “either they knew my 1877 notes, unravelling the contradictory statements of Davaine, Jaillard and Leplat, and Paul Bert, or they did not know them. If they did not know them on March 22, 1882, there is nothing more to say; they were not guilty in acting as they did, but they should have owned it freely. If they did know them, why ever did they inoculate blood taken from a sheep twenty-four hours after its death? They say that this blood was not septic; but how do they know? They have done nothing to find out. They should have inoculated some guinea-pigs, by choice, and then tried some cultures in a vacuum to compare them with cultures in contact with air. Why will they not receive me? A meeting between truth-seeking men would be the most natural thing in the world!”
Still hoping to persuade his adversaries to meet him at Turin and be convinced, Pasteur wrote to them. “Paris, May 9, 1883. Gentlemen—Your letter of April 30 surprises me very much. What is in question between you and me? That I should go to Turin, if you will allow me, to demonstrate that sheep, dead of charbon, as numerous as you like, will, for a few hours after their death, be exclusively infected with anthrax, and that the day after their death they will present both anthrax and septic infection; and that therefore, when, on March 23, 1882, wishing to inoculate blood infected with anthrax only into sheep vaccinated and non-vaccinated, you took blood from a carcase twenty-four hours after death, you committed a grave scientific mistake.
“Instead of answering yes or no, instead of saying to me ‘Come to Turin,’ or ‘Do not come,’ you ask me, in a manuscript letter of seventeen pages, to send you from Paris, in writing, preliminary explanations of all that I should have to demonstrate in Turin.