1882—1884 143 



the scientists who meddled with medicine, chymiasters as he 

 called them, "They have come to this," he said, "that in 

 typhoid fevers they only see the typhoid fever, in typhoid fever, 

 fever only, and in fever, increased heat. They have thus 

 reached that luminous idea that heat must be fought by cold. 

 This organism is on fire, let us pour water over it; it is a 

 fireman's doctrine." 



Vulpian, whose grave mind was not unlike Pasteur's, inter- 

 vened, and said that new attempts should not be discouraged 

 by sneers. Without pronouncing on the merits of the cold-bath 

 method, which he had not tried, he looked beyond this dis- 

 cussion, indicating the road which theoretically seemed to him 

 to lead to a curative treatment. The first thing was to discover 

 the agent which causes typhoid fever, and then, when that 

 was known, attempt to destroy or paralyse it in the tissues of 

 typhoid patients, or else to find drugs capable either of pre- 

 venting the aggressions of that agent or of annihilating the 

 effects of that aggression, "to produce, relatively to typhoid 

 fever, the effect determined by salicylate of soda in acute rheu- 

 matism of the articulations." 



Beyond the restricted audience, allowed a few seats in the 

 Academie de Medecine, the general public itself was taking an 

 interest in this prolonged debate. The very high death rate 

 in the army due to typhoid fever was the cause of this eager 

 attention. Whilst the German army, where Brand's method 

 was employed, hardly lost five men out of a thousand, the 

 French army lost more than ten per thousand. 



Whilst military service was not compulsory, epidemics in 

 barracks were looked upon with more or less compassionate 

 attention. But the thought that typhoid fever had been more 

 destructive within the last ten years than the most sanguinary 

 battle now awakened all minds and hearts. Is then personal 

 fear necessary to awaken human compassion ? 



Bouley, who was more given to propagating new doctrines 

 than to lingering on such philosophical problems, thought it 

 was time to introduce into the debate certain ideas on the great 

 problems tackled by medicine since the discovery of what 

 might be called a fourth kingdom in nature, that of microbia. 

 In a statement read at the Academie de Medecine, he formu- 

 lated in broad lines the role of the infinitesimally small and 

 their activity in producing the phenomena of fermentations and 

 diseases. He showed by the parallel works of Pasteur on the 



