Five years previously, Bouley, in the annual combined public meeting of the five Academies, had proclaimed his enthusiasm for the discovery of the vaccination of anthrax. But on hearing him again on this October day, in 1885, his colleagues could not but be painfully struck by the change in him; his voice was weak, his face thin and pale. He was dying of an affection of the heart, and quite aware of it, but he was sustained by a wonderful energy, and ready to forget his sufferings in his joy at the thought that the sum of human sorrows would be diminished by Pasteur’s victory. He went to the Académie de Médecine the next day to enjoy the echo of the great sitting of the Académie des Sciences. He died on November 29.
The chairman of the Academy of Medicine, M. Jules Bergeron, applauded Pasteur’s statement all the more that he too had publicly deplored (in 1862) the impotence of medical science in the presence of this cruel disease.
But while M. Bergeron shared the admiration felt by Vulpian and Dr. Grancher for the experiments which had transformed the rabic virus into its own vaccine, other medical men were divided into several categories: some were full of enthusiasm, others reserved their opinion, many were sceptical, and a few even positively hostile.
As soon as Pasteur’s paper was published, people bitten by rabid dogs began to arrive from all sides to the laboratory. The “service” of hydrophobia became the chief business of the day. Every morning was spent by Eugène Viala in preparing the fragments of marrow used for inoculations: in a little room permanently kept at a temperature of 20° to 23° C., stood rows of sterilized flasks, their tubular openings closed by plugs of cotton-wool. Each flask contained a rabic marrow, hanging from the stopper by a thread and gradually drying up by the action of some fragments of caustic potash lying at the bottom of the flask. Viala cut those marrows into small pieces by means of scissors previously put through a flame, and placed them in small sterilized glasses; he then added a few drops of veal broth and pounded the mixture with a glass rod. The vaccinal liquid was now ready; each glass was covered with a paper cover, and bore the date of the medulla used, the earliest of which was fourteen days old. For each patient under treatment from a certain date, there was a whole series of little glasses. Pasteur always attended these operations personally.
In the large hall of the laboratory, Pasteur’s collaborators, Messrs. Chamberland and Roux, carried on investigations into contagious diseases under the master’s directions; the place was full of flasks, pipets, phials, containing culture broths. Etienne Wasserzug, another curator, hardly more than a boy, fresh from the Ecole Normale, where his bright intelligence and affectionate heart had made him very popular, translated (for he knew the English, German, Italian, Hungarian and Spanish languages, and was awaiting a favourable opportunity of learning Russian) the letters which arrived from all parts of the world; he also entertained foreign scientists. Pasteur had in him a most valuable interpreter. Physicians came from all parts of the world asking to be allowed to study the details of the method. One morning, Dr. Grancher found Pasteur listening to a physician who was gravely and solemnly holding forth his objections to microbian doctrines, and in particular to the treatment of hydrophobia. Pasteur having heard this long monologue, rose and said, “Sir, your language is not very intelligible to me. I am not a physician and do not desire to be one. Never speak to me of your dogma of morbid spontaneity. I am a chemist; I carry out experiments and I try to understand what they teach me. What do you think, doctor?” he added, turning to M. Grancher. The latter smilingly answered that the hour for inoculations had struck. They took place at eleven, in Pasteur’s study; he, standing by the open door, called out the names of the patients. The date and circumstances of the bites and the veterinary surgeon’s certificate were entered in a register, and the patients were divided into series according to the degree of virulence which was to be inoculated on each day of the period of treatment.
Pasteur took a personal interest in each of his patients, helping those who were poor and illiterate to find suitable lodgings in the great capital. Children especially inspired him with a loving solicitude. But his pity was mingled with terror, when, on November 9, a little girl of ten was brought to him who had been severely bitten on the head by a mountain dog, on October 3, thirty-seven days before!! The wound was still suppurating. He said to himself, “This is a hopeless case: hydrophobia is no doubt about to appear immediately; it is much too late for the preventive treatment to have the least chance of success. Should I not, in the scientific interest of the method, refuse to treat this child? If the issue is fatal, all those who have already been treated will be frightened, and many bitten persons, discouraged from coming to the laboratory, may succumb to the disease!” These thoughts rapidly crossed Pasteur’s mind. But he found himself unable to resist his compassion for the father and mother, begging him to try and save their child.
After the treatment was over, Louise Pelletier had returned to school, when fits of breathlessness appeared, soon followed by convulsive spasms; she could swallow nothing. Pasteur hastened to her side when these symptoms began, and new inoculations were attempted. On December 2, there was a respite of a few hours, moments of calm which inspired Pasteur with the vain hope that she might yet be saved. This delusion was a short-lived one. After attending Bouley’s funeral, his heart full of sorrow, Pasteur spent the day by little Louise’s bedside, in her parents’ rooms in the Rue Dauphine. He could not tear himself away; she herself, full of affection for him, gasped out a desire that he should not go away, that he should stay with her! She felt for his hand between two spasms. Pasteur shared the grief of the father and mother. When all hope had to be abandoned: “I did so wish I could have saved your little one!” he said. And as he came down the staircase, he burst into tears.
He was obliged, a few days later, to preside at the reception of Joseph Bertrand at the Académie Française; his sad feelings little in harmony with the occasion. He read in a mournful and troubled voice the speech he had prepared during his peaceful and happy holidays at Arbois. Henry Houssaye, reporting on this ceremony in the Journal des Débats, wrote, “M. Pasteur ended his speech amidst a torrent of applause, he received a veritable ovation. He seemed unaccountably moved. How can M. Pasteur, who has received every mark of admiration, every supreme honour, whose name is consecrated by universal renown, still be touched by anything save the discoveries of his powerful genius?” People did not realize that Pasteur’s thoughts were far away from himself and from his brilliant discovery. He was thinking of Dumas, his master, of Bouley, his faithful friend and colleague, and of the child he had been unable to snatch from the jaws of death; his mind was not with the living, but with the dead.
A telegram from New York having announced that four children, bitten by rabid dogs, were starting for Paris, many adversaries who had heard of Louise Pelletier’s death were saying triumphantly that, if those children’s parents had known of her fate, they would have spared them so long and useless a journey.
The four little Americans belonged to workmen’s families and were sent to Paris by means of a public subscription opened in the columns of the New York Herald; they were accompanied by a doctor and by the mother of the youngest of them, a boy only five years old. After the first inoculation, this little boy, astonished at the insignificant prick, could not help saying, “Is this all we have come such a long journey for?” The children were received with enthusiasm on their return to New York, and were asked “many questions about the great man who had taken such care of them.”