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290 THE LIFE OF PASTEUR 



away, by one of his chiefs, from some post-mortem business, 

 to assist in the maternity wards; nobody being struck by the 

 thought of the infection which might thus be carried from the 

 theatre to the bed of the patient. 



The discussion which arose in 1858 at the Academic de Mede- 

 cine lasted four months^ and hypotheses of all kinds were 

 brought forward. Trousseau alone showed some prescience of 

 the future by noticing an analogy between infectious surgical 

 accidents and infectious puerperal accidents; the idea of a fer- 

 ment even occurred to him. Years passed ; women of the lowef 

 classes looked upon the Maternite as the vestibule of death. 

 In 1864, 310 deaths occurred out of 1,350 confinement cases; 

 in 1865, the hospital had to be closed. Works of cleansing and 

 improvements gave rise to a hope that the *' epidemic genius 

 might be driven away, * But, at the very beginning of 1866, 

 wrote Dr. Trelat, then surgeon- in-chief at the Maternite, **the 

 sanitary condition seemea perturbed, the mortality rose in 

 January, and in February we were overwhelmed. '^ Twenty- 

 eight deaths had occurred out of 103 cases. 



Trelat enumerated various causes, bad ventilation, neigh- 

 bouring wards, etc., but where was the origin of the 

 evil? 



** Under the influence of causes which escape us,'^ wrote M. 

 Leon Le Fort about that time, *' puerperal fever develops in a 

 recently delivered woman; she becomes a centre of infection^ 

 and, if that infection is freely exercised, the epidemic is con- 

 stituted." 



Tarnier, who took Trelat 's place at the Maternite, in 1867, 

 had been for eleven years so convinced of the infectious nature 

 of puerperal fever that he thought but of arresting the evil by 

 every possible means of defence, the first of which seemed to 

 him isolation of the patients. 



In 1874, Dr. Budin, then walking the hospitals, had noted in 

 Edinburgh the improvement due to antisepsis, thanks to Lister. 

 Three or four years later, in 1877 and 1878, after having seen 

 that, in the various maternity hospitals in Holland, Germany, 

 Austria, Russia and Denmark, antisepsis was practised with 

 success, he brought his impressions with him to Paris. Tarnier 

 hastened to employ carbolic acid at the Maternite with excel- 

 lent results, and his assistant, M. Bar, tried sublimate. "While 

 that new period of victory over fatal cases was beginning. 

 Pasteur came to the Academic de Medecine, having found, in 



