NINETEENTH-CENTURY MEDICINE 



"The wort thus prepared remains uncontaminated 

 indefinitely, in spite of its susceptibility to change when 

 exposed to the air under conditions which allow it to 

 gather the dusty particles which float in the atmosphere. 

 It is the same in the case of urine, beef-tea, and grape- 

 must, and generally with all those putrefactable and 

 fermentable liquids which have the property when 

 heated to boiling-point of destroying the vitality of 

 dust germs." 7 



There was nothing in these studies bearing directly 

 upon the question of animal diseases, yet before they 

 were finished they had stimulated progress in more 

 than one field of pathology. At the very outset they 

 sufficed to start afresh the inquiry as to the r61e played 

 by micro-organisms in disease. In particular they 

 led the French physician Devaine to return to some 

 interrupted studies which he had made ten years be- 

 fore in reference to the animal disease called anthrax, 

 or splenic fever, a disease that cost the farmers of Eu- 

 rope millions of francs annually through loss of sheep 

 and cattle. In 1850 Devaine had seen multitudes of 

 bacteria in the blood of animals who had died of an- 

 thrax, but he did not at that time think of them as 

 having a causal relation to the disease. Now, how- 

 ever, in 1863, stimulated by Pasteur's new revelations 

 regarding the power of bacteria, he returned to the sub- 

 ject, and soon became convinced, through experiments 

 by means of inoculation, that the microscopic organ- 

 isms he had discovered were the veritable and the sole 

 cause of the infectious disease anthrax. 



The publication of this belief in 1863 aroused a furor 



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