Nothing is truer than that there is no one orthodox way of hunting microbes, and the differences between the ways Koch and Pasteur went at their work are the best illustrations of this. Koch was as coldly logical as a text-book of geometry—he searched out his bacillus of tuberculosis with systematic experiments, and he thought of all the objections that doubters might make before such doubters knew that there was any thing to have doubts about. Koch always recited his failures with just as much and no more enthusiasm than he did his triumphs. There was something inhumanly just and right about him and he looked at his own discoveries as if they had been those of another man of whom he was a little over-critical. But Pasteur! This man was a passionate groper whose head was incessantly inventing right theories and wrong guesses—shooting them out like a display of village fireworks going off bewilderingly by accident.
Pasteur started hunting microbes of disease and punched into a boil on the back of the neck of one of his assistants and grew a germ from it and was sure it was the cause of boils; he hurried from these experiments to the hospital to find his chain microbes in the bodies of women dying with child-bed fever; from here he rushed out into the country to discover—but not to prove it precisely—that earthworms carry anthrax bacilli from the deep buried carcasses of cattle to the surface of the fields. He was a strange genius who seemed to need the energetic, gusto-ish doing of a dozen things at the same time—more or less accurately—in order to discover that grain of truth which lies at the bottom of most of his work.
In this variety of simultaneous goings-on you can fairly feel Pasteur fumbling at a way of getting ahead of Koch. Koch had shown with beautiful clearness that germs cause disease, there is no doubt about that—but this isn't the most important thing to do. . . this is nothing, this proof, the thing to do is to find a way to prevent the germs from killing people, to protect mankind from death! “What impossible, what absurd experiments didn't we discuss,” said Roux long after this distressing time when Pasteur was stumbling about in the dark. “We would laugh at them ourselves, next day.”
To understand Pasteur, it is important to know his wild stabs and his failures as well as his triumphs. He had not the precise methods of growing microbes pure—it took the patience of Koch to devise such things—and one day to his disgust, Pasteur observed that a bottle of boiled urine in which he had planted anthrax bacilli was swarming with unbidden guests, contaminating microbes of the air that had sneaked in. The following morning he observed that there were no anthrax germs left at all; they had been completely choked out by the bacilli from the air.
At once Pasteur jumped to a fine idea: “If the harmless bugs from the air choke out the anthrax bacilli in the bottle, they will do it in the body too! It is a kind of dog-eat-dog!” shouted Pasteur, and at once he put Roux and Chamberland to work on the fantastic experiment of giving guinea-pigs anthrax and then shooting doses of billions of harmless microbes into them—beneficent germs which were to chase the anthrax bacilli round the body and devour them—they were to be like the mongoose which kills cobras. . .
Pasteur gravely announced: “That there were high hopes for the cure of disease from this experiment,” but that is the last you hear of it, for Pasteur was never a man to give the world of science the benefit of studying his failures. But a little later the Academy of Sciences sent him on a queer errand, and on this mission he stumbled across a fact that gave him the first clew to a genuine, a remarkable way of turning savage microbes into friendly ones. It was an outlandish plan he began to devise, to dream about, of turning living microbes of disease against their own kind, so guarding animals and men from invisible deaths. At this time there was a great to-do about a cure for anthrax, invented by the horse doctor, Louvrier, in the Jura mountains in the east of France. Louvrier had cured hundreds of cows who were at death's door, said the influential men of the district: it was time that this treatment received scientific approval.
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Pasteur arrived there, escorted by his young assistants, and found that this miraculous cure consisted first, in having several farm hands rub the sick cow violently to make her as hot as possible; then long gashes were cut in the poor beast's skin and into these cuts Louvrier poured turpentine; finally the now bellowing and deplorably maltreated cow was covered—excepting her facet—with an inch thick layer of unmentionable stuff soaked in hot vinegar. This ointment was kept on the animal—who now doubtless wished she were dead—by a cloth that covered her entire body.
Pasteur said to Louvrier: “Let us make an experiment. All cows attacked by anthrax do not die, some of them just get better by themselves; there is only one way to find out. Doctor Louvrier, whether or no it is your treatment that saves them.”
So four good healthy cows were brought, and Pasteur in the presence of Louvrier and a solemn commission of farmers, shot a powerful dose of virulent anthrax microbes into the shoulder of each one of these beasts: this stuff would have surely killed a sheep, it was enough to do to death a few dozen guinea-pigs. The next day Pasteur and the commission and Louvrier returned, and all the cows had large feverish swellings on their shoulders, their breath came in snorts—they were in a bad way, that was very evident.
“Now, Doctor,” said Pasteur, “choose two of these sick cows—we'll call them A and B. Give them your new cure, and we'll leave cows C and D without any treatment at all.” So Louvrier assaulted poor A and B with his villainous treatment. The result was a terrible blow to the sincere would-be curer of cows, for one of the cows that Louvrier treated got better—but the other perished; and one of the creatures that had got no treatment at all, died—but the other got better.
“Even this experiment might have tricked us, Doctor,” said Pasteur. “If you had given your treatment to cows A and D instead of A and B—we all would have thought you had really found a sovereign remedy for anthrax.”
Here were two cows left over from the experiment, beasts that had had a hard siege of anthrax and got better from it: “What shall I do with these two cows?” pondered Pasteur. “Well, I might try shooting a still more savage strain of anthrax bacilli into them—I have one family of anthrax germs in Paris that would give even a rhinoceros a bad night.”
So Pasteur sent to Paris for his vicious cultivation, and injected five drops into the shoulders of those two cows that had got better. Then he waited, but nothing happened to the beasts, not even a tiny swelling at the point where he had injected millions of poisonous bacilli; the cows remained perfectly happy!
Then Pasteur jumped to one of his quick conclusions: “Once a cow has anthrax, but gets better from it, all the anthrax microbes in the world cannot give her another attack—she is immune.” This thought began playing and flitting about in his head and made him wool-gather so that he did not hear questions that Madame Pasteur asked him, nor see obvious things at which his eyes looked directly.
“How to give an animal a little attack of anthrax, a safe little attack that won't kill him, but will surely protect him. . . There must be a way to do that. . . I must find a way.”
So it went with Pasteur for months and he kept saying to Roux and Chamberland: “What mystery is there, like the mystery of the non-recurrence of virulent maladies?” He went about muttering to himself: “We must immunize—we must immunize against microbes. . .”
Meanwhile Pasteur and his faithful crew were training their microscopes on stuff from men and animals dead of a dozen different diseases; there was a kind of mixed-up fumbling in this work between 1878 and 1880—when one day fate, or God, put a marvelous way to immunize right under Pasteur's lucky nose. (It is hard for me to give you this story exactly straight because all of the various people who have written about Pasteur tell it differently and Pasteur himself in his scientific paper says nothing whatever about this remarkable discovery having been a happy accident.) But here it is, as well as I can do, with certain gaps that I have had to fill in myself.
In 1880, Pasteur was playing with the very tiny microbe that kills chick
ens with a malady known as chicken cholera. Doctor Peronçito had discovered this microbe, so tiny that it was hardly more than a quivering point before the strongest lens. Pasteur was the first microbe hunter to grow it pure, in a soup that he cooked for it from chicken meat. And after he had watched these dancing points multiply into millions in a few hours, he let fall the smallest part of a drop of this bug-swarming broth onto a crumb of bread—and fed this bread to a chicken. In a few hours the unfortunate beast stopped clucking and refused to eat, her feathers ruffled until she looked like a fluffy ball, and the next day Pasteur came in to find the bird tottering, its eyes shut in a kind of invincible drowsiness that turned quickly into death.
Roux and Chamberland nursed these terrible wee microbes along carefully; day after day they dipped a clean platinum needle into a bottle of chicken broth that teemed with germs and then carefully shook the same still-wet needle into a fresh flask of soup that held no microbe at all—so day after day these transplantations went on—always with new myriads of germs growing from the few that had come in on the moistened needle. The benches of the laboratory became cluttered with abandoned cultures, some of them weeks old. “We'll have to clean this mess up to-morrow,” thought Pasteur.
Then the god of good accidents whispered in his ear, and Pasteur said to Roux: “We know the chicken cholera microbes are still alive in this bottle. . . they're several weeks old, it is true. . . but just try shooting a few drops of this old cultivation into some chickens. . .”
Roux followed these directions and the chickens promptly got sick, turned drowsy, lost their customary lively frivolousness. But next morning, when Pasteur came into the laboratory looking for these birds, to put them on the post-mortem board—he was sure they would be dead—he found them perfectly happy and gay!
“This is strange,” pondered Pasteur, “always before this the microbes from our cultivations have killed twenty chickens out of twenty. . . ” But the time for his discovery was not yet, and next day, after these strangely recovered chickens had been put in charge of the caretaker, Pasteur and his family and Roux and Chamberland went off on their summer vacations. They forgot about those birds. . .
But at last one day Pasteur told the laboratory servant: “Bring up some healthy birds, new chickens, and get them ready for inoculation.”
“But we only have a couple of unused chickens left, Mr. Pasteur—remember, you used the last ones before you went away—you injected the old cultures into them, and they got sick but didn't die?”
Pasteur made a few appropriate remarks about servants who neglected to keep a good supply of fresh chickens on hand. “Well, all right, bring up what new chickens you have left—and let's have a couple of those used ones too—the ones that had the cholera but got better. . .”
The squawking birds were brought up. The assistant shot the soup with its myriads of germs into the breast muscles of the chickens—into the new ones, and into the ones that had got better! Roux and Chamberland came into the laboratory next morning—Pasteur was always there an hour or so ahead of them—they heard the muffled voice of their master shouting to them from the animal room below stairs:
“Roux, Chamberland, come down here—hurry!”
They found him pacing up and down before the chicken cages. “Look!” said Pasteur. “The new birds we shot yesterday—they're dead all right, as they ought to be. . . But now see these chickens that recovered alter we shot them with the old cultures last month. . . They got the same murderous dose yesterday—but look at them—they have resisted the virulent dose perfectly. . . they are gay. . . they are eating!”
Roux and Chamberland were puzzled for a moment.
Then Pasteur raved: “But don't you see what this means? Everything is found! Now I have found out how to make a beast a little sick—just a little sick so that he will get better, from a disease. . . All we have to do is to let our virulent microbes grow old in their bottles. . . instead of planting them into new ones every day. . . When the microbes age, they get tame. . . they give the chicken the disease. . . but only a little of it. . . and when she gets better she can stand all the vicious virulent microbes in the world. . . This is our chance—this is my most remarkable discovery—this is a vaccine I've discovered, much more sure, more scientific than the one for smallpox where no one has seen the germ. . . We'll apply this to anthrax too. . . to all virulent diseases.,.. We will save lives. . .!”
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A lesser man than Pasteur might have done this same accidental experiment—for this was no test planned by the human brain—a lesser man might have done it and would have spent years trying to explain to himself the mystery of it, but Pasteur stumbling on this chance protection of a couple of miserable chickens, saw at once a new way of guarding living things against virulent germs, of saving men from death. His brain jumped to a new way of tricking the hitherto inexorable God who ruled that men must be helpless before the sneaking attacks of his sub-visible enemies. . .
Pasteur was fifty-eight years old now, he was past his prime, but with this chance discovery of the vaccine that saved chickens from cholera, he started the six most hectic years of his life, years of appalling arguments and unhoped-for triumphs and terrible disappointments—into these years, in short, he poured the energy and the events of the lives of a hundred ordinary men.
Hurriedly Pasteur and Roux and Chamberland set out to confirm the first chance observation they had made. They let virulent chicken cholera microbes grow old in their bottles of broth; they inoculated these enfeebled bugs into dozens of healthy chickens—which promptly got sick, but as quickly recovered. Then triumphantly, a few days later, they watched these birds—these vaccinated chickens—tolerate murderous injections of millions of microbes, enough to kill a dozen new birds who were not immune.
So it was that Pasteur, ingeniously, turned microbes against themselves. He tamed them first, and then he strangely used them for wonderful protective weapons against the assaults of their own kind.
And now Pasteur, with his characteristic impetuousness—after all it was only chickens he had learned to guard from death so far—became more arrogant than ever with the old-fashioned doctors who talked Latin words and wrote shot-gun prescriptions. He went to a meeting of the Academy of Medicine and with complaisance told the doctors how his chicken vaccinations were a great advance on the immortal smallpox discovery of Jenner: “In this case I have demonstrated a thing that Jenner never could do in smallpox—and that is, that the microbe that kills is the same one that guards the animal from death!”
The old-fashioned blue-coated doctors were peeved at Pasteur's appointing himself a god superior to the great Jenner; Doctor Jules Guérin, the famous surgeon, became particularly sarcastic about Pasteur making so much of mere fussings with chickens—and the fight was on. Pasteur, in a fury got up and shouted remarks about the utter nonsensicality of one of Guérin's pet operations, and there occurred a most scandalous scene—it embarrasses me to have to tell about it—a strange shambles in which Guérin, who was past eighty, rose from his seat and was about to fall on the sixty-year-old Pasteur. The old man aimed a wallop at Pasteur, but frantic friends jumped in and prevented the impending fisticuffs of these two men who thought they could settle the truth by kicks and blows and mayhem.
Next day the ancient Guérin sent his seconds to Pasteur with a challenge to a duel, but Pasteur, evidently, did not care to risk dying that way and he sent Guérin's friends to the Secretary of the Academy with this message: “I am ready, having no right to act otherwise, to modify whatever the editors may consider as going beyond the rights of criticism and legitimate defense.” And so Pasteur once more proved himself to be a human being—if not what is commonly called a man—by backing out of the fight.
As I have told you before, Pasteur had a great deal of the mystic in him. Often he bowed himself down before that mysterious Infinite—he worshiped the Infinite when he was not clutching at it like a baby reaching for the moon; but frequently, the moment one o
f his beautiful experiments had knocked another little chunk off that surrounding Unknown, he made the mistake of believing that all mysteries had dissolved away. It was so now—when he saw that he could really protect chickens perfectly against a fatal illness by his amazing trick of sticking a few of their own tamed assassins into them. At once Pasteur guessed: “Maybe these fowl-cholera microbes will guard chickens against other virulent diseases!” and promptly he inoculated some hens with his new vaccine of weakened fowl cholera germs and then injected them with some certainly murderous anthrax bacilli—and the chickens did not die!
Wildly excited he wrote to Dumas, his old professor, and hinted that the new fowl-cholera vaccine might be a wonderful Pan-Protector against all kinds of virulent maladies. “If this is confirmed,” he wrote, “we can hope for the most important consequences, even in human maladies.”
Old Dumas, greatly thrilled, had this letter published in the Reports of the Academy of Sciences, and there it stands, a sad monument to Pasteur's impetuousness, a blot on his record of reporting nothing but facts. So far as I can find, Pasteur never retracted this error, although he soon found that a vaccine made from one kind of bacillus does not protect an animal against all diseases, but only—and then not absolutely surely—against the one, disease of which the microbe in the vaccine is the cause.
But one of Pasteur's most charming traits was his characteristic of a scientific Phoenix, who rose triumphantly from the ashes of his own mistakes. When his imagination carried him into the clouds you find him presently landing on the ground with a bump—making clever experiments again, digging for good true hard facts. So it is not surprising to find him, with Roux and Chamberland, in 1881, discovering a very pretty way of taming vicious anthrax microbes and turning them into a vaccine. By this time the quest after vaccines had become so violent that Roux and Chamberland hardly had their Sundays off, and never went on vacations; they slept at the laboratory to be near their tubes and microscopes and microbes. And here, Pasteur directing them, they delicately weakened anthrax bacilli so that some killed guinea-pigs, but not rabbits, and others did mice to death, but were too weak to harm guinea-pigs. They shot the weaker and then the stronger microbes into sheep, who got a little sick but then recovered, and after that these sheep could stand, apparently, the assaults of vicious anthrax germs that were able to kill even a cow.
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