NEW EXAMPLES OF PHYSIOLOGICAL CONFLICTS 271 



microbe, Pasteur darted to the blackboard and drew 

 the organism with its chaplets, saying: 'There! There 

 is its picture!' His conviction was so strong that he 

 could not refrain from expressing it forcibly. One 

 can scarcely understand to-day the surprise, and the 

 stupefaction, even, of the medical men and their students 

 when at the hospital, with a simplicity and an assurance 

 which seemed presumptuous in a man who was entering 

 a lying-in hospital for the first time, Pasteur criticised 

 the methods of dressing wounds, and declared that all 

 bandages should be placed in a sterilizing oven. Further- 

 more, he maintained that he could tell by examination 

 of the lochia, which women would have an attack of 

 puerperal fever, and he assured them that in a woman 

 who was very badly infected he could demonstrate 

 the microbe in the blood of the finger. And he was as 

 good as his word. In spite of the tyranny exercised by 

 the medical education which weighed heavily at that time 

 on the minds of the students, some of them were capti- 

 vated and came to the laboratory to observe at closer 

 range those methods which afforded diagnoses so exact 

 and prognoses so sure."^ 



I will cite only one more fact, which in some degree 

 forms a connection with what is to follow. In the course 

 of this search for microbes which has been so fruitful, 

 Pasteur encounters a bacterium which cannot develop 

 under the skin because the temperature of the human 

 body is a little too high for it. Immediately his thought 

 reverts to the anthrax bacteridium which is unable to 

 develop in birds, and he asks himself if this does not 

 result from the high temperature of these animals, 

 which is always in the neighborhood of 42 C. What 

 would happen if one could lower the temperature of 



1 L'ffiuvre medicale de Pasteur, par le Dr. E. Roux, Agenda du chim- 

 jste, 1S9G. 



