1873—1877 5 



thirst for scientific truth — after experimental researches carried 

 on from 1865 to 1869, brought the proof that tuberculosis is a 

 disease which reproduces itself, and cannot be reproduced but 

 by itself ; in a word, specific, inoculable, and contagious, he was 

 treated almost as a perturber of medical order. 



Dr. Pidoux, an ideal representative of traditional medicine, 

 with his gold-buttoned blue coat and his reputation equally 

 great in Paris and at the Eaux-Bonnes, declared that the idea of 

 specificity was a fatal thought. Himself a pillar of the doctrine 

 of diathesis and of the morbid spontaneity of the organism, he 

 exclaimed in some much applauded speeches : " Tuberculosis ! 

 but that is the common result of a quantity of divers external 

 and internal causes, not the product of a specific agent ever the 

 same I ' Was not this disease to be looked upon as " one and 

 multiple at the same time, bringing the same final conclusion, 

 the necrobiotic and infecting destruction of the plasmatic tissue 

 of an organ by a number of roads which the hygienist and 

 physician must endeavour to close?" Where would these 

 specificity doctrines lead to? "Applied to chronic diseases, 

 these doctrines condemn us to the research of specific remedies 

 or vaccines, and all progress is arrested. . . . Specificity im- 

 mobilizes medicine." These phrases were reproduced by the 

 medical press. 



The bacillus of tuberculosis had not been discovered by Vil- 

 lemin ; it was only found and isolated much later, in 1882, by 

 Dr. Koch ; but Villemin suspected the existence of a virus. In 

 order to demonstrate the infectious nature of tuberculosis, he 

 experimented on animals, multiplying inoculations ; he took the 

 sputum of tuberculous patients, spread it on cotton wool, dried 

 it, and then made the cotton wool into a bed for little guinea- 

 pigs, who became tuberculous. Pidoux answered these precise 

 facts by declaring that Villemin was fascinated by inoculation, 

 adding ironically, " Then all we doctors have to do is to set 

 out nets to catch the sporules ef tuberculosis, and find a 

 vaccine." 



That sudden theory of phthisis, falling from the clouds, 

 resembled Pasteur's theory of germs floating in air. Was it 

 not better, urged Pidoux the heterogenist, to remain in the 

 truer and more philosophical doctrine of spontaneous genera- 

 tion? ' Let us believe, until the contrary is proved, that we 

 are right, we partisans of the common etiology of phthisis, par- 

 tisans of the spontaneous tuberculous degeneration of the 



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