456 THE LIFE OF PASTEUR 



Almost invariably, not only did the membranes cease to 

 increase during the twenty-four hours following the first injec- 

 tion, but they began to come away within thirty-six or forty- 

 eight hours, the third day at the latest; the livid, leaden pale- 

 ness of the face disappeared; the child was saved. 



From 1890 to 1893 there had been 3,971 cases of diphtheria, 

 fatal in 2,029 cases, the average mortality being therefore 51 

 per 100. The serum treatment, applied to hundreds of children, 

 brought it down to less than 24 per 100 in four months. At 

 the Trousseau Hospital, where the serum was not employed, 

 the mortality during the same period was 60 per 100. 



In May, M. Roux gave a lecture on diphtheria at Lille, at the 

 request of the Provident Society of the Friends of Science, 

 which held its general meeting in that town. Pasteur, who 

 was president of the Society, came to Lille to thank its inhabi- 

 tants for the support they had afforded for forty years to the 

 Society. 



The master and his disciple were received in the Hall of the 

 Industrial Society. Pasteur listened with an admiring emotion 

 to his pupil, whose rigorous experimentation, together with the 

 beauty of the object in view, filled him with enthusiasm. He 

 who had said, '* Exhaust every combination, until the mind 

 can conceive no others possible," was delighted to hear the 

 methodical exposition of the manner in which this great problem 

 had been attacked and solved. 



At the Hygiene and Demography Congress at Buda-Pesth, 

 M. Roux, repeating and enlarging his lecture, made a com- 

 munication on the serotherapy of diphtheria which created a 

 great sensation in Europe. 



In France, prefects asked the Minister of the Interior how 

 local physicians might obtain this antidiphtheritic serum. The 

 Figaro newspaper opened a subscription towards preserving 

 children from croup ; it soon reached more than a million francs. 

 The Pasteur Institute was now able to build stables, buy a 

 hundred horses, render them immune, and constitute a per- 

 manent organization for serotherapy. In three months, 50,000 

 doses of serum were about to be given away. 



Pasteur, who was then at Arbois, followed every detail with 

 passionate interest. Sitting under the old quinces in his little 

 garden, he read the lists of subscribers, names of little children, 

 offering charitable gifts as they entered this life, and names of 

 sorrowing parents, giving in the names of dear lost ones. 



