266 THE LIFE OF PASTEUR 



ture of ignorance and prejudice. Others, on the other hand, 

 amongst whom the greatest were to be found, proclaimed that 

 Pasteur's work was immortal and that the word "theory" 

 used by him should be changed into that of "doctrine." One 

 of those who thus spoke, with the right given by full knowledge, 

 was Dr. Sedillot, whose open and critical mind had kept him 

 from becoming like the old men described by Sainte Beuve as 

 stopping their watch at a given time and refusing to recognize 

 further progress. He was formerly Director of the Army 

 Medical School at Strasburg, and had already retired in 1870, 

 but had joined the army again as volunteer surgeon. It will 

 be remembered that he had written from the Hagueneau 

 ambulance to the Academic des Sciences — of which he was a 

 corresponding member — to call the attention of his colleagues 

 to the horrors of purulent infection, which defied his zeal and 

 devotion. 



No one followed Pasteur's work with greater attention than 

 this tall, sad-looking old man of seventy-four; he was one of 

 those who had been torn away from his native Alsace, and .he 

 could not get over it. In March, 1878, he read a paper to the 

 Academ3% entitled "On the Influence of M. Pasteur's Work 

 on Medicine and Surgery." 



Those discoveries, he said, which had deeply modified the 

 state of surgery, and particularly the treatment of wounds, 

 could be traced back to one principle. This principle was 

 applicable to various facts, and explained Lister's success, and 

 the fact that certain operations had become possible, and that 

 certain cases, formerly considered hopeless, were now being 

 recorded on all sides. Real progress lay there. Sedillot 's 

 concluding paragraph deserves to be handed down as a com- 

 ment precious from a contemporary: "We shall have seen the 

 conception and birth of a new surgery, a daughter of Science 

 and of Art, which will be one of the greatest wonders of our 

 century, and with which the names of Pasteur and Lister will 

 remain gloriously connected." 



In that treatise, Sedillot invented a new word to charac- 

 terize all that body of organisms and infinitely small vibriones, 

 bacteria, bac- eridia, etc. ; he proposed to designate them all 

 under the generic term of microbe. This word had, in 

 Sedillot 's eyes, the advantage of being short and of having a 

 general signification. He however felt some scruple before 

 using it, and consulted Littre, who replied on February 26, 



