PiuiPARATORV TO Ri'.si-ARcn Cari;i;r 71 



Sorbonne where his professorship was in chemistry.'"- He was 

 bcqinnint; to exercise a threat inlluencc on animal and human 

 patholoi^y. and, indeed, on medical and health matters [generally. 

 But Emile Duclaux warns that ever we must keep in mind "the 

 fact that Pasteur was neither a physician nor a veterinary surgeon, 

 and that the history of any disease, ^j a disease, did not interest 

 him deeply. That which he studied in the anthrax bacteridium 

 was not the anthrax, but the mode of reaction of the microbe 

 toward the organism in which it developed. Every bacterial cell 

 able to become pathogenic in any way or by any means whatso- 

 ,ever, and thus to throw light on the mechanism of the struggle 

 with the cells of the host organism, was welcome in his labora- 

 tory." ^" 



We do not know precisely when Erwin Smith learned of Pas- 

 teur's vaccine against fowl cholera. But one so enthused about the 

 vaccine made from an attenuated culture against anthrax would 

 learn soon, it would seem, of another similar and practically con- 

 temporaneous discovery important to animal pathology, especially 

 since he believed that these " laid the foundations of immun- 

 ology." ^" During the middle 1880's Joseph Meister, a youth nine 

 years of age, was vaccinated successfully for hydrophobia by a 

 remedy found by Pasteur in an attenuated virus; and this Smith 

 called "' the greatest triumph of all." Years later, in Paris, he 

 would become acquainted with Meister, by that time an adult. ^"^ 



We do not know, furthermore, precisely when Erwin Smith' 

 first learned of the new anilin stains begun about 1875 to be used 

 by Carl Weigert and others to demonstrate bacteria in tissues. We 

 do know that Smith regarded their introduction and that of photo- 

 micrography as an important "milestone" of progress in bacteri- 

 ology; ^^"^ and that he believed staining in tissues was "worked up 

 carefully for bacteria causing animal diseases" more than a 

 quarter of a century before much was known of the " best methods 

 of staining bacteria in vegetable tissues." '" The effective tech- 



"-y4 bioneer of public health William Thompson Sedguick, op. cit., 7; F. H. 

 Garrison, Intro, to the hist, of med., op. cit., 575, 579. 

 *"' Pasteur, The history of a mind, op. cit., 253-254. 

 ^"^ Fifty years of pathology, op. cit., 17. 



"^"^ Idem, Journal of Smith's third European tour, February 2, 1925. 

 "^^"^ Bacteria in relation to plant diseases, op. cit., 1: 153. 

 ^"^ Idem, 29, 153. 



