The next morning, at ten o’clock, crowds gathered on the station platform with waving handkerchiefs. People were showing each other a great Edinburgh daily paper, in which Pasteur’s speech to the undergraduates was reproduced and which also contained the following announcement in large print:

“In memory of M. Pasteur’s visit to Edinburgh, Mr. Younger offers to the Edinburgh University a donation of £500.”

Livingstone’s daughter, Mrs. Bruce, on whom Pasteur had called the preceding day, came to the station a few moments before the departure of the train, bringing him a book entitled The Life of Livingstone.

The saloon carriage awaited Pasteur and his friends. They departed, delighted with the hospitality they had received, and much struck with the prominent place given to science and the welcome accorded to Pasteur. “This is indeed glory,” said one of them. “Believe me,” said Pasteur, “I only look upon it as a reason for continuing to go forward as long as my strength does not fail me.”

CHAPTER XII
1884—1885

Amidst the various researches undertaken in his laboratory, one study was placed by Pasteur above every other, one mystery constantly haunted his mind—that of hydrophobia. When he was received at the Académie Française, Renan, hoping to prove himself a prophet for once, said to him: “Humanity will owe to you deliverance from a horrible disease and also from a sad anomaly: I mean the distrust which we cannot help mingling with the caresses of the animal in whom we see most of nature’s smiling benevolence.”

The two first mad dogs brought into the laboratory were given to Pasteur, in 1880, by M. Bourrel, an old army veterinary surgeon who had long been trying to find a remedy for hydrophobia. He had invented a preventive measure which consisted in filing down the teeth of dogs, so that they should not bite into the skin; in 1874, he had written that vivisection threw no light on that disease, the laws of which were “impenetrable to science until now.” It now occurred to him that, perhaps, the investigators in the laboratory of the Ecole Normale might be more successful than he had been in his kennels in the Rue Fontaine-au-Roi.

One of the two dogs he sent was suffering from what is called dumb madness: his jaw hung, half opened and paralyzed, his tongue was covered with foam, and his eyes full of wistful anguish; the other made ferocious darts at anything held out to him, with a rabid fury in his bloodshot eyes, and, in the hallucinations of his delirium, gave vent to haunting, despairing howls.

Much confusion prevailed at that time regarding this disease, its seat, its causes, and its remedy. Three things seemed positive: firstly, that the rabic virus was contained in the saliva of the mad animals; secondly, that it was communicated through bites; and thirdly, that the period of incubation might vary from a few days to several months. Clinical observation was reduced to complete impotence; perhaps experiments might throw some light on the subject.

Bouley had affirmed in April, 1870, that the germ of the evil was localized in the saliva, and a new fact had seemed to support this theory. On December 10, 1880, Pasteur was advised by Professor Lannelongue that a five-year-old child, bitten on the face a month before, had just been admitted into the Hôpital Trousseau. The unfortunate little patient presented all the characteristics of hydrophobia: spasms, restlessness, shudders at the least breath of air, an ardent thirst, accompanied with an absolute impossibility of swallowing, convulsive movements, fits of furious rage—not one symptom was absent. The child died after twenty-four hours of horrible suffering—suffocated by the mucus which filled the mouth. Pasteur gathered some of that mucus four hours after the child’s death, and mixed it with water; he then inoculated this into some rabbits, which died in less than thirty-six hours, and whose saliva, injected into other rabbits, provoked an almost equally rapid death. Dr. Maurice Raynaud, who had already declared that hydrophobia could be transmitted to rabbits through the human saliva, and who had also caused the death of some rabbits with the saliva of that same child, thought himself justified in saying that those rabbits had died of hydrophobia.