Man and Microbes. 87 



X. PASTEUR. 



In 1863, the year of the discovery of the anthrax bacilli, 

 Louis Pasteur turned his attentions toward the study of this 

 disease. To him we are far more indebted than to any one 

 else for the comforts and well-being of humanity to-day. 

 Pasteur was the sower of the modern ideas of medicine. Our 

 practices of asepsis, antisepsis, and vaccinations against de- 

 structive diseases are the direct results of the brilliant experi- 

 ments of this master mind. Certainly Pasteur may be regarded 

 as the modern god of medicine. 



Until the entrance of Pasteur into the scientific arena the 

 world was laboring under a false delusion, and one of momen- 

 tous significance. I have reference to that predominating 

 theory of that time, that life originated spontaneously. The 

 Greeks and Romans firmly held this view. Virgil taught us 

 how to make bees. Aristotle taught that frogs and eels could 

 develop from dead matter. Van Helmont, in the seventeenth 

 century, gives us a prescription for making mice : "If soiled 

 linen be squeezed into the mouth of a vessel containing some 

 grains of wheat, the grains are transmitted into adult mice 

 in about twenty-one days." "To produce scorpions," wrote 

 Van Helmont, "scoop out a hole in a brick. Put into it some 

 sweet basil, crushed. Lay a second brick upon the first, so 

 that the hole may be perfectly covered. Expose the two bricks 

 to the sun, and at the end of a few days the smell of sweet basil, 

 acting as a ferment, will change the herb into real scorpions." 

 Even in our own day some people really believe that mice 

 develop from old rags. How mussels develop from mud, and 

 worms from rotten timberwood which later become butter- 

 flies, and then in turn birds, were frequently described in type. 

 Even as late in 1858, Pouchet published a "Note on Vegetable 

 and Animal Protoorganisms Spontaneously Germinated in 

 Artificial Air and Oxygen." 



Among thinking men an intense controversy raged through- 

 out the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries respecting this 

 point. The experiments of Father Needham, Abbe Spallan- 

 zanni, Schwann, Helmholtz, Schroeder and Dusch, among 

 others, certainly strongly suggested that spontaneous origin of 

 life did not occur. 



It was not until 1862 that Pasteur proved conclusively to a 

 skeptical gathering at the French Academy of Science that "la 



