RESEARCH IN DEVELOPMENT OF HEALTH 371 



own country, and Tyndall and Huxley in ours. A few physicians and 

 surgeons of scientific training in France and England recognized the 

 importance of his discoveries, such as Alphonse Guerin, Villemin and 

 Vulpin, in his own country, while Lister in ours was already at work, 

 had experimented widely and wrote his memorable letter of congratula- 

 tion to Pasteur in 1874, informing him of the work he had been doing 

 in introducing antiseptic surgery in England during the preceding nine 

 years. Against this intrepid little band of experimental scientists were 

 massed all the batteries of orthodox medical nescience served by the dis- 

 tinguished physicians and surgeons of the time; but truth is mighty 

 and must prevail. Davaine applying Pasteur's principles in a medical 

 direction had found out the bacterial origin of anthrax, and although 

 he was violently attacked by oratorical arguments in opposition to ex- 

 perimental proofs, and accused, as many physiologists are to-day of hav- 

 ing " destroyed very many animals and saved very few human beings," 

 Iris facts held fast, and combined with the later experiments of Koch 

 and of Pasteur, not merely established the etiology of anthrax as we 

 know it to-day, but gave a support and forward growth to that new- 

 born babe, Bacteriology, which without such animal experiments could 

 never have grown into the beneficent giant that it is to-day in all its 

 glorious strength for the weal of humanity. 



Pasteur himself meanwhile was hard at work in the small ill- 

 equipped laboratory of physiological chemistry of the Ecole Normale at 

 Paris from which the fame of his discoveries began rapidly to spread 

 and shed a new light forth on the medical world. Pasteur at this stage 

 had already largely rehabilitated the national prosperity of his own coun- 

 try by his successful researches on silk-worm disease and on fermenta- 

 tion maladies and the diseases of wines. All this effect upon national 

 industries, it is to be noted, followed on from an inquiry of apparently 

 no practical importance on spontaneous generation. He now turned 

 his genius towards disease, there also utilizing the same discovery aris- 

 ing from a research that contained at first sight no possible applica- 

 tions to disease and the remainder of his life was devoted to the exten- 

 sion of these studies. The subsequent history of this discovery is the 

 science of bacteriology with all its ramifications and manifold applica- 

 tions in industry, in agriculture, in medicine and in public health, in- 

 vestigated by the experimental method by thousands of willing workers 

 all over the civilized world. Who but the ignorant Philistine, who 

 knows not what he prates about, can deny the profound influence of 

 animal experimentation, and the philosophic application of the prin- 

 ciple of research upon the history of the world? 



Let us now, from the vantage-point of the present, look back at the 

 past and glean from the study of the manner in which this science 

 took origin some knowledge to guide us, first, as to how research may be 



