46 MICROBES AND THE MICROBE -KILLER. 



result. Common sense told me now that it was useless to 

 swallow any more medicine. If the medicine itself could 

 not stop that little bit of fermentation I put into it, how 

 could it stop the fermentation inside my body ? 



From that day I stopped doctoring with physicians' 

 remedies, and I have not expended a single dollar since 

 upon them, except to occasionally test the antiseptic pow- 

 ers of some new remedy, always with the result that the 

 new remedy increased rather than stopped fermentation. 



This test opened my eyes. It was a long step in ad- 

 vance, and drove me faster than ever to make further 

 experiments and find out if there really was a drug or 

 combination of drugs that would stand the test as an 

 antiseptic and at the same time be harmless to the hu- 

 man body. 



To the drug stores I went and bought samples of 

 drugs, poisons, especially those claimed by physicians 

 to be antiseptics ; not for the purpose of swallowing 

 them, or in order to find out how they would act inside 

 my body, as physicians do with their patients— that 

 would have been deliberate suicide, and whatever the re- 

 sult would have been it would have established nothing. 

 The object I had in view was to test each drug separately 

 outside of my body, to ascertain if it was an antiseptic 

 and would stop fermentation, and also if it was harmless 

 or not. I certainly had no desire to kill myself with 

 drugs the action of which I knew nothing, the same 

 as thousands of others know nothing about the action 

 of certain drugs and still persist in their use. Those 

 men who kill themselves or their patients by experi- 

 menting upon them with drugs of which they know 

 nothing, receive at least the questionable honor that 

 they died or killed their patients for *^ the cause of medi. 

 cal science." Any experimenting on the human body 

 made by the profession is always done for the ^' cause of 

 medical science." The patient has to submit. Does it 

 not serve those patients right, if they will not insist that 

 they must not be experimented upon ? Had I killed my- 

 self in a similar manner what would they say ? The 



