PROPHYLAXY OF INFECTIOUS DISEASES. 
729 
ries and this change has been so fecund and so beneficial that 
in these twenty-five years medicine has made more progress 
than it ever made—etiology, hygiene, sanitary police almost 
entirely renewed ; hospital gangrene, gangrenous septicaemia, 
purulent infection, puerperal fever, chased from the hospitals, 
surgery provided with such security that every audacious oper¬ 
ation is permitted ; prophylaxy of infectious diseases based on 
the marvelous discovery of the administration of viruses and of 
the vaccination with weakened viruses; the obscure mystery of 
immunity almost entirely revealed ; the serum of immunized 
animals. applied—with what success—to the treatment of the 
most dangerous diseases ; all this unconquerable scientific group 
proceeds from Pasteur, and it can be said that we are only at 
the beginning of a new era which history will name after him. 
(Repeated applause.) 
The medicine of animals was the first to benefit, and that 
widely, by the great discovery of the vaccination of Pasteur. 
Anthrax diseases in all their forms, rouget of swine, those 
enemies of twenty centuries which prevailed in the same regions, 
periodically ruining them, in spite of all the constant and 
powerless efforts of veterinarians. Preventive vaccination has 
mastered them, and when it has been systematically applied the 
diseases have disappeared, to such an extent that there scarcely 
remains a trace of the losses they caused in other days. 
During the last years human medicine has also benefited by 
this great discovery. Hafkine, a student of the Pasteur Insti¬ 
tute, who practices in British India, treats the plague and cholera 
with inoculations of attenuated virus, and we have read in the 
newspapers that 60 per cent, of the soldiers in the English army 
received before leaving for South Africa similar inoculations 
against typhoid fever. This is a new application of this great • 
discovery. 
| * * * 
We do not know yet how to immunize animals against glan¬ 
ders and tuberculosis ; perhaps we never will, for they are dis¬ 
eases that may be again contracted. Glanders may be cured, 
