1889—1895 453 



Many letters brought to Pasteur requested that he should 

 study or order the study of such and such a disease. Some of 

 these letters responded to preoccupations which had long been 

 in the mind of Pasteur and his disciples. One day he received 

 these lines: 



*'You have done all the good a man could do on earth. If 

 you will, you can surely find a remedy for the horrible disease 

 called diphtheria. Our children, to whom we teach your name 

 as that of a great benefactor, will owe their lives to you. — 

 A Mother.'^ 



Pasteur, in spite of his failing strength, had hopes that he 

 would yet live to see the defeat of the foe so dreaded by 

 mothers. In the laboratory of the Pasteur Institute, Dr. Roux 

 and Dr. Yersin were obstinately pursuing the study of this 

 disease. In their first paper on the subject, modestly entitled 

 A Contribution to the Study of Diphtheria, they said: *'Ever 

 since Bretonneau, diphtheria has been looked upon as a specific 

 and contagious disease; its study has therefore been under- 

 taken of late years with the help of the microbian methods 

 which have already been the means of finding the cause of 

 many other infectious diseases." 



In spite of the convictions of Bretonneau, who had, in 1818, 

 witnessed a violent epidemic of croup in the centre of France, 

 his view was far from being generally adopted. Velpeau, 

 then a young student, wrote to him in 1820 that all the 

 members, save two, of the Faculty of Medicine were agreed 

 in opposing or blaming his opinions. Another brilliant pupil 

 of Bretonneau *s. Dr. Trousseau, who never ceased to cor- 

 respond with his old master, wrote to him in 1854: *'It remains 

 to be proved that diphtheria always comes from a germ. J 

 hardly doubt this with regard to small-pox; to be consistent, I 

 ought not to doubt it either with regard to diphtheria. I was 

 thinking so this morning, as I was performing tracheotomy 

 on a poor child twenty-eight months old ; opposite the bed, 

 there was a picture of his five-year-old brother, painted on his 

 death-bed. He had succumbed five years ago, to malignant 



•angina." 



Knowing Bretonneau 's ideas on contagion, Trousseau wrote 

 further down: "I shall have the beds and bedding burnt, the 

 Jajier hangings also, for they have a velvety and attractive 



