He regretted that he was not a medical man, fancying that it might have facilitated his task. It was true that, at every incursion on the domain of Medicine, he was looked upon as a chemist—a chymiaster, some said—who was poaching on the preserves of others. The distrust felt by the physicians in the chemists was of a long standing. In the Traité de Thérapeutique, published in 1855 by Trousseau and Pidoux, we find this passage: “When a chemist has seen the chemical conditions of respiration, of digestion, or of the action of some drug, he thinks he has given the theory of those functions and phenomena. It is ever the same delusion which chemists will never get over. We must make up our minds to that, but let us beware of trying to profit by the precious researches which they would probably never undertake if they were not stimulated by the ambition of explaining what is outside their range.” Pidoux never retrenched anything from two other phrases, also to be found in that same treatise: “Between a physiological fact and a pathological fact there is the same difference as between a mineral and a vegetable”; and: “It is not within the power of physiology to explain the simplest pathological affection.” Trousseau, on the other hand, was endowed with the far-seeing intelligence of a great physician attentive to the progress of science. He was greatly interested in Pasteur’s work, and fully appreciated the possibilities opened by each of his discoveries.
Pasteur, with the simplicity which contrasted with his extraordinary powers, supposed that, if he were armed with diplomas, he would have greater authority to direct Medicine towards the study of the conditions of existence of phenomena, and—correlatively to the traditional method of observation, which consists in knowing and describing exactly the course of the disease—to inspire practitioners with the desire to prevent and to determine its cause. An unexpected offer went some way towards filling what he considered as a blank. At the beginning of the year 1873, a place was vacant in the section of the Free Associates of the Academy of Medicine. He was asked to stand for it, and hastened to accept. He was elected with a majority of only one vote, though he had been first on the section’s list. The other suffrages were divided between Messrs. Le Roy de Méricourt, Brochin, Lhéritier, and Bertillon.
Pasteur, as soon as he was elected, promised himself that he would be a most punctual academician. It was on a Tuesday in April that he attended his first meeting. As he walked towards the desk allotted to him, his paralyzed left leg dragging a little, no one among his colleagues suspected that this quiet and unassuming new member would become the greatest revolutionary ever known in Medicine.
One thing added to Pasteur’s pleasure in being elected—the fact that he would join Claude Bernard. The latter had often felt somewhat forlorn in that centre, where some hostility was so often to be seen towards all that was outside the Clinic. This was the time when the “princes of science,” or those who were considered as such, were all physicians. Every great physician was conscious of being a ruling power. The almost daily habit of advising and counselling was added to that idea of haughty or benevolent superiority to the rest of the world; and, accustomed to dictate his wishes, the physician frequently adopted an authoritative tone and became a sort of personage. “Have you noticed,” said Claude Bernard to Pasteur with a smile under which many feelings were hidden, “that, when a doctor enters a room, he always looks as if he was going to say, ‘I have just been saving a fellow-man’?”
Pasteur knew not those harmless shafts which are a revenge for prolonged pomposity. Why need Claude Bernard trouble to wonder what So-and-so might think? He had the consciousness of the work accomplished and the esteem and admiration of men whose suffrage more than satisfied him. Whilst Pasteur was already desirous of spreading in the Académie Médecine the faith which inspired him, Claude Bernard remembered the refractory state of mind of those who, at the time of his first lectures on experimental physiology applied to medicine, affirmed that “physiology can be of no practical use in medicine; it is but a science de luxe which could well be dispensed with.” He energetically defended this science de luxe as the very science of life. In his opening lecture at the Museum in 1870, he said that “descriptive anatomy is to physiology as geography to history; and, as it is not sufficient to understand the topography of a country to know its history, so is it not enough to know the anatomy of an organ to understand its functions.” Méry, an old surgeon, familiarly compared anatomists to those errand boys in large towns, who know the names of the streets and the numbers of the houses, but do not know what goes on inside. There are indeed in tissues and organs physico-chemical phenomena for which anatomy cannot account.
Claude Bernard was convinced that Medicine would gradually emerge from quackery, and this by means of the experimental method, like all other science. “No doubt,” he said, “we shall not live to see the blossoming out of scientific medicine, but such is the fate of humanity; those that sow on the field of science are not destined to reap the fruit of their labours.” And so saying, Claude Bernard continued to sow.
It is true that here and there flashes of light had preceded Pasteur; but, instead of being guided by them, most doctors continued to advance majestically in the midst of darkness. Whenever murderous diseases, scourges of humanity, were in question, long French or Latin words were put forward, such as “Epidemic genius,” fatum, quid ignotum quid divinum, etc. Medical constitution was also a useful word, elastic and applicable to anything.
When the Vale de Grâce physician, Villemin—a modest, gentle-voiced man, who, under his quiet exterior, hid a veritable thirst for scientific truth—after experimental researches carried on from 1865 to 1869, brought the proof that tuberculosis is a disease which reproduces itself, and cannot be reproduced but by itself; in a word, specific, inoculable, and contagious, he was treated almost as a perturber of medical order.
Dr. Pidoux, an ideal representative of traditional medicine, with his gold-buttoned blue coat and his reputation equally great in Paris and at the Eaux-Bonnes, declared that the idea of specificity was a fatal thought. Himself a pillar of the doctrine of diathesis and of the morbid spontaneity of the organism, he exclaimed in some much applauded speeches: “Tuberculosis! but that is the common result of a quantity of divers external and internal causes, not the product of a specific agent ever the same!” Was not this disease to be looked upon as “one and multiple at the same time, bringing the same final conclusion, the necrobiotic and infecting destruction of the plasmatic tissue of an organ by a number of roads which the hygienist and physician must endeavour to close?” Where would these specificity doctrines lead to? “Applied to chronic diseases, these doctrines condemn us to the research of specific remedies or vaccines, and all progress is arrested.... Specificity immobilizes medicine.” These phrases were reproduced by the medical press.
The bacillus of tuberculosis had not been discovered by Villemin; it was only found and isolated much later, in 1882, by Dr. Koch; but Villemin suspected the existence of a virus. In order to demonstrate the infectious nature of tuberculosis, he experimented on animals, multiplying inoculations; he took the sputum of tuberculous patients, spread it on cotton wool, dried it, and then made the cotton wool into a bed for little guinea-pigs, who became tuberculous. Pidoux answered these precise facts by declaring that Villemin was fascinated by inoculation, adding ironically, “Then all we doctors have to do is to set out nets to catch the sporules of tuberculosis, and find a vaccine.”