LABORATORIES AND PROBLEMS 



now suffices, happily, for the application of the pro- 

 tective inoculations which enable the person otherwise 

 doomed to resist the poison and go unscathed. Thus 

 it is that the persons who gather here each day to the 

 number of fifty, or even one hundred, have the appear- 

 ance of and the feelings of average health, though a 

 large proportion of them bear in their systems, on 

 arrival, the germs of a disease that would bring them 

 speedily to a terrible end were it not that the genius 

 of Pasteur had found a way to give them immunity. 

 The number of persons who have been given the 

 anti-rabic treatment here is more than twenty-five 

 thousand. To have given safety to such an army of 

 unfortunates is, indeed, enough merit for any single in- 

 stitution ; but it must not be supposed that this record 

 is by any manner of means the full measure of the 

 benefits which the Institut Pasteur has conferred 

 upon humanity. In point of fact, the preparation and 

 use of the anti-rabic serum is only one of many aims 

 of the institution, whose full scope is as wide as the 

 entire domain of contagious diseases. Pasteur's per- 

 sonal discoveries had demonstrated the relation of 

 certain lower organisms, notably the bacteria, to the 

 contagious diseases, and had shown the possibility of 

 giving immunity from certain of these diseases through 

 the use of cultures of the noxious bacteria themselves. 

 He believed that these methods could be extended 

 and developed until all the contagious diseases, which 

 hitherto have accounted for so startling a proportion 

 of all deaths, were brought within the control of med- 

 ical science. His deepest thought in founding the 

 institute was to supply a tangible seat of operations 



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