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laid the foundations of true knowledge, and transformed medicine from what 
has been described above into the glorious, living, evolving science that we 
possess to-day. 
The men who fought side by side with Pasteur in his famous struggle 
against orthodoxy in medicine as represented by the leading physicians and 
surgeons of the period between 1860 and 1880 were mainly chemists, biologists, and 
physiologists, such as Claude Bernard, Paul Bert, J. B. Dumas, Biot, Belard, and 
Sainte-Claire Deville in his own country, and Tyndall and Huxley in ours. A 
few physiciafis and surgeons of scientific training in France and England recog- 
nised the importance of his discoveries, such as Alphonse Guérin, Villemin, and 
Vulpian in his own country, while Lister in ours was already at work, had 
experimented widely and wrote his memorable letter of congratulation to 
Pasteur in 1874, informing him of the work he had been doing in introducing 
antiseptic surgery in England during the preceding nine years. Against this 
intrepid little band of experimental scientists were massed all the batteries of 
orthodox medical nescience served by the distinguished physicians and surgeons 
of the time; but truth is mighty and must prevail. Davaine applying Pasteur’s 
principles in a medical direction had found out the bacterial origin of anthrax, 
and although he was violently attacked by oratorical arguments in opposition to 
experimental proofs, and accused, as many physiologists are to-day, of having 
‘destroyed very many animals and saved very few human beings,’ his facts 
held fast, and combined with the later experiments of Koch and of Pasteur, 
not merely established the etiology of anthrax as we know it to-day, but gave a 
support and forward growth to that new-born babe, Bacteriology, which without 
such animal experiments could never have grown into the beneficent giant that 
it is to-day in all its glorious strength for the weal of humanity. 
Pasteur himself meanwhile was hard at work in the small ill-equipped 
laboratory of Physiological Chemistry of the Ecole Normale at Paris, from 
which the fame of his discoveries began rapidly to spread, and shed a new light 
forth on the medical world. Pasteur at this stage had already largely re- 
habilitated the national prosperity of his own country by his successful 
researches on silk-worm disease and on fermentation maladies and the diseases 
of wines. All this effect upon national industries, it is to be noted, followed on 
from an inquiry of apparently no practical importance on spontaneous generation, 
He now turned his genius towards disease, there also utilising the same dis- 
covery arising from a research that contained at first sight no possible appli- 
cations to disease, and the remainder of his life was devoted to the extension 
of these studies. The subsequent history of this discovery is the science of 
Bacteriology with all its ramifications and manifold applications in industry, 
in agriculture, in medicine, and in public health, investigated by the experi- 
mental method by thousands of willing workers all over the civilised world. 
Who but the ignorant Philistine, who knows not what he prates about, can 
deny the profound influence of animal experimentation, and the philosophic 
application of the principle of research upon the history of the world? 
Let us now, from the vantage-point of the present, look back at the past and 
glean from the study of the manner in which this science took origin some 
knowledge to guide us, first, as to how research may be fostered and encouraged 
in the future, and secondly, as to how the results of research may be applied 
for social advantage. 
The first and perhaps the finest thought of all is that research must be 
pursued with the highest ideals of the imaginative mind apart from all desired 
applications or all wished for material advantages. If we might personify 
Nature, it would seem that she does not love that researcher who only seeks 
her cupboard, and never shows her finest treasures to him. She must be loved 
for her own beauty and not for her fortune, or she will ne’er be wooed and won, 
Not even the altruistic appeal of love for suffering mankind would seem to 
reach her ears; she seems to say: ‘ Love me, be intimate with me, search me 
out in my secret ways, and in addition to the rapture that will fill your soul at 
some new beauty of mine that you have discovered and known first of all men, 
all these other material things will be added, and then I may take compassion 
on your purblind brothers and allow you to show them these secret charms 
of mine also, so that their eyes may perchance grow strong, and they, too, led 
