266 PASTEUR: THE HISTORY OF A MIND 



inoculation of which into a guinea pig produces pus 

 collections or abscesses, that is to say, a pathological 

 condition very different from that produced by either 

 the anthrax bacillus or the septic vibrio. Its power of 

 producing pus is so great that it still does so even though 

 the inoculation is made after the vibrio has been killed 

 by the action of heat and thus it behaves like an inert 

 body. This should interest you, you medical men, 

 we seem to hear Pasteur saying, for, with this organism 

 one can obtain those celebrated metastatic abscesses 

 which have puzzled you so much from the time of 

 Hippocrates. When it is inoculated, living or dead, 

 into the veins so that the circulation will distribute 

 it throughout the tissues, we see the lungs, the liver 

 and other organs filled within 24 hours with an infinite 

 number of metastatic abscesses in all stages of develop- 

 ment. Why should it be astonishing that a diseased 

 organ can do the same thing in a living being, if it emp- 

 ties its parasites into a blood vessel? 



Here again, as is always the case in ordinary water 

 and in the air, there are other anaerobic vibrios which, 

 when introduced into the tissues, do not develop there 

 for various reasons: in one case, because the normal 

 temperature of the body is too high; in another case, 

 because the healthy tissues are too well supplied with 

 oxygen. But diminish in any way whatsoever this 

 vital resistance, which, mark my words, has no abstract 

 significance in my discourse, and always represents a 

 concrete force, and you will see these microbes hitherto 

 dormant, take possession of the organism and combine 

 their actions and efforts to produce purulent septi- 

 cemias or purulent septic infections. These are the 

 enemies with which we are threatened on all sides in 

 ordinary life, and to which we are still further exposed 

 when the surgeon intervenes and causes or -repairs lesions 



