58 PASTEUR AND AFTER PASTEUR 



had among his friends Dumas and Claude Bernard ; 

 among his disciples, Roux. But his opponents 

 the men who would not give up their barren way 

 of thinking of diseases, nor admit that it was bound 

 to suffer defeat all along the line they were hard 

 to bear with, some of them : and it is no wonder, 

 seeing the lives of men, women, and children at 

 stake, that he often lost his temper over the 

 solemn parade of the wrong sort of thoughts.* 

 Take the famous story which Roux tells, one of 

 many instances : 



" In acute abscesses, and in boils, you find a 

 minute round organism, growing in masses : it is 

 easily cultivated in broth. You find it likewise in 

 the infective osteomyelitis of children. Pasteur 

 affirmed that osteomyelitis and boils are two forms 

 of one and the same disease, and that osteomyelitis 

 is a boil in a bone. In 1878, this assertion was 

 much laughed at by surgeons. In cases of infection 

 after childbirth, the blood-clots contain a minute 

 round organism, growing in chains : it looks, 

 especially in pure culture, like a rosary. Pasteur 



* " Ce rfetait pas qu'avant Pasteur il n'y eut, ca et la, de 

 vives, de soudaines clartes. Mais, loin de se laisser guider 

 par elles, la plupart des medecins continuaient de s^avancer 

 majestueusement au milieu des tenebres. Des qu'il etait 

 question de maladies meurtrieres, de fleaux qui passent sur 

 Thumanite, en avant les grands mots fran^ais ou latins, 

 comme le genie epidemique, le fatum^ le quid ignotum, le 

 quid divinum. On parlait aussi beaucoup de constitution 

 medicale, mot large, facile, elastique, se pretant a tout." 

 Vie de Pasteur, ch. viii. 



