LOUIS PASTEUR 145 



tion of many subsequent advances in prevention of 

 diseases of several types. 



Did Pasteur then retire from active labour, one man's 

 gigantic work having been done? Did he remind his 

 co-workers that since 1868 half-paralysis had made his 

 work very difficult? No! Rather he reminded his 

 closest friends that his part-paralysis which he suffered 

 in 1868 enabled him to make more cautious and effective 

 use of those parts of his body not affected by his mal- 

 ady a malady for which the answer is not yet at hand. 

 Instead he turned now to his last and most spectacular 

 achievement. For many years the sympathies of this 

 great founder of the science of bacteriology had been 

 sorely tried because of the ravages of the awful disease 

 rabies or hydrophobia. It is doubtless true that the 

 cry of "mad dog" has created human panic since the 

 times of primitive men. No sane person who has wit- 

 nessed death from hydrophobia will willingly do so a 

 second time, unless he is needed in ministrations of 

 assistance or mercy. For years Pasteur had studied 

 the dreaded disease and performed experiments with 

 rabbits and other animals in efforts to locate the causal 

 organism and to find a preventive or cure. It almost 

 belittles this gigantic task to go directly to results, 

 omitting description of many fruitless efforts, false 

 hopes roused in the man whose heart as well as mind 

 was now devoted to his supreme task. However, one 

 day, after many failures to locate any guiding arrow, 

 Pasteur used for inoculation in a rabbit a piece of old 

 and dry spinal-cord tissue previously taken from a rabbit 

 that had died of rabies. He had previously oftentimes 





