Preparatory to Ri:si:ar(:h Carf.i-r 7") 



France has had many ^rcat sons, none ^t^rcater than [Pasteur]. His 

 refutation of the doctrine of spontaneous generation cleared the air of 

 many misconceptions and hiid the foundations for exact experimentation. 

 His demonstration of the nature of pebrine and flacherie, two destructive 

 diseases of silk worms, broui^ht attain into vivid lii;ht the assumption that 

 the orit^in of a great variety of human and animal diseases sliould be 

 sought in the activities of microscopic organisms. His studies of anthrax 

 and' other diseases of warm-blooded animals confirmed this suspicion and 

 set a great many persons thinking and working. His investigations of the 

 problems connected with fermentation were similarly fertile in discovery 

 and in suggestion. 



The publication of Robert Koch's great paper on tuberculosis in 1884 

 marked another distinct advance. The same memorable year Koch pub- 

 lished in full his discovery of the cause of Asiatic cholera, only a brief 

 announcement of it having been made in 1883. The whole world was 

 interested, and from this time on experimenters began to multiply in every 

 civilized land, boards of health, universities, and private citizens vying 

 with each other in the establishment of laboratories for the study of these 

 minute organisms endowed with so much power for good or evil. 



In a sense, these two paragraphs must have been, on Smith's 

 part, somewhat autobiographical. They must have represented his 

 memory of the evolution of bacteriological science in America and 

 throughout the world. Pasteur's early studies on crystallography 

 find little place except indirectly through the great one's mastery 

 of experimental technique. Dr. Christian A. Herter,''" at the 

 opening of the medical department of Johns Hopkins University 

 in 1903, appraised in a valuable address " The Influence of Pasteur 

 on Medical Science," '" and, among other points, estimated that 

 the " crystallographic researches were the bridge over which the 

 far-seeing investigator passed on the way to lay the foundations 

 of a new biological science, a science which has effected a veritable 

 revolution in our conceptions of medical problems." From these 

 studies Pasteur went on to his study of the micro-organic life 

 involved in various kinds of fermentation. Pasteur's saving of the 

 Silkworm industry in France ranks as a great scientific and eco- 

 nomic feat. Against one disease which was killing silkworms — 

 the pebrine or corpuscle disease caused by the psorosperm Nosema 

 bombycis — he devised a method of breeding new and healthy silk- 

 v/orms by carefully selecting eggs shown by the microscope to be 



"° Concerning Herter, see, Dr. J. C. Hemmeter, MaMer minds in tnedicine, 546- 

 348, N. Y., Medical Life Press, 1927. 

 "^ Op. cit., 326-327. 



