CENTURY'S PROGRESS IN SCIENTIFIC MEDICINE 



\vere the veritable and the sole cause of the infectious 

 disease anthrax. 



The publication of this belief in 1863 aroused a furor 

 of controversy. That a microscopic vegetable could 

 cause a virulent systemic disease was an idea altogether 

 too startling to be accepted in a day, and the generality 

 of biologists and physicians demanded more convincing 

 proofs than Devaine as yet was able to offer. 



Naturally a host of other investigators all over the 

 world entered the field. Foremost among these was the 

 German Dr. Robert Koch, who soon corroborated all 

 that Devaine had observed, and carried the experiments 

 further in the direction of the cultivation of successive 

 generations of the bacteria in artificial media, inocula- 

 tions being made from such pure cultures of the eighth 

 generation, with the astonishing result that animals thus 

 inoculated at once succumbed to the disease. 



Such experiments seem demonstrative, yet the world 

 was unconvinced, and in 1876, while the controversy 

 was still at its height, Pasteur was prevailed upon to 

 take the matter in hand. The great chemist was be- 

 coming more and more exclusively a biologist as the 

 years passed, and in recent years his famous studies of 

 the silk- worm diseases, which he proved due to bacterial in- 

 fection, and of the question of spontaneous generation, had 

 given him unequalled resources in microscopical technique. 

 And so when, with the aid of his laboratory associates 

 Dnclaux and Chamberland and Roux, he took up the 

 mooted anthrax question, the scientific world awaited 

 the issue with bated breath. And when, in 1877, Pas- 

 teur was ready to report on his studies of anthrax, he 

 came forward with such a wealth of demonstrative ex- 

 periments experiments the rigid accuracy of which no 



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