For weeks they waited—hair graying again—for signs of rabies in these animals, but none ever came. They were happy, these ghoulish fighters of death! Their clumsy terrible fourteen vaccinations had not hurt the dogs—but were they immune?
Pasteur dreaded it—if this failed all of these years of work had gone for nothing, and “I am getting old, old. . . ” you can hear him whispering to himself. But the test had to be made. Would the dogs stand an injection of the most deadly rabid virus—right into their brains—a business that killed an ordinary dog one hundred times out of one hundred?
Then one day Roux bored little holes through the skulls of two vaccinated dogs—and two not vaccinated ones: and into all four went a heavy dose of the most virulent virus. . .
One month later, Pasteur and his men, at the end of three years of work, knew that victory over hydrophobia was in their hands. For, while the two vaccinated dogs romped and sniffed about their cages with never a sign of anything ailing them—the two that had not received the fourteen protective doses of dried rabbit's brain—these two had howled their last howls and died of rabies.
Now immediately—the life-saver in this man was always downing the mere searcher—Pasteur's head buzzed with plans to wipe hydrophobia from the earth, he had a hundred foolish projects, and he walked in a brown world of thought, in a mist of plans that Roux and Chamberland, and not even Madame Pasteur could penetrate. It was 1884, and when Pasteur forgot their wedding anniversary, the long-suffering lady wrote to her daughter:
“Your father is absorbed in his thoughts, talks little, sleeps little, rises at dawn, and, in one word, continues the life I began with him this day thirty-five years ago.”
At first Pasteur thought of shooting his weakened rabies virus into all the dogs of France in one stupendous Napoleonic series of injections: “We must remember that no human being is ever attacked with rabies except after being bitten by a rabid dog. . . Now if we wipe it out of dogs with our vaccine. . . ” he suggested to the famous veterinarian, Nocard, who laughed, and shook his head.
“There are more than a hundred thousand dogs and hounds and puppies in the city of Paris alone,” Nocard told him, “and more than two million, five hundred thousand dogs in all of France—and if each of these brutes had to get fourteen shots of your vaccine fourteen days in a row. . . where would you get the men? Where would you get the time? Where the devil would you get the rabbits? Where would you get sick spinal cord enough to make one-thousandth enough vaccine?”
Then finally there dawned on Pasteur a simple way out of his trouble: “It's not the dogs we must give our fourteen doses of vaccine,” he pondered, “it's the human beings that have been bitten by mad dogs. . .”
“How easy!. . . After a person has been bitten by a mad dog, it is always weeks before the disease develops in him. . . The virus has to crawl all the way from the bite to the brain. . . While that is going on we can shoot in our fourteen doses. . . and protect him!” and hurriedly Pasteur called Roux and Chamberland together, to try it on the dogs first.
They put mad dogs in cages with healthy ones, and the mad dogs bit the normal ones.
Roux injected virulent stuff from rabid rabbits into the brains of other healthy dogs.
Then they gave these beasts, certain to die if they were left alone—they shot the fourteen stronger and stronger doses of vaccine into them. It was an unheard-of triumph! For every one of these creatures lived—threw off perfectly, mysteriously, the attacks of their unseen assassins, and Pasteur—who had had a bitter experience with his anthrax inoculations—asked that all of his experiments be checked by a commission of the best medical men of France, and at the end of these severe experiments the commission announced:
“Once a dog is made immune with the gradually more virulent spinal cords of rabbits dead of rabies, nothing on earth can give him the disease.”
From all over the world came letters, urgent telegrams, from physicians, from poor fathers and mothers who were waiting terror-smitten for their children, mangled by mad dogs, to die—frantic messages poured in on Pasteur, begging him to send them his vaccine to use on threatened humans. Even the magnificent Emperor of Brazil condescended to write Pasteur, begging him. . . And you may guess how Pasteur was worried! This was no affair like anthrax, where, if the vaccine was a little, just a shade too strong, a few sheep would die. Here a slip meant the lives of babies. . . Never was any microbe hunter faced with a worse riddle. “Not a single one of all my dogs has ever died from the vaccine,” Pasteur pondered. “All of the bitten ones have been perfectly protected by it. . . It must work the same way on humans—it must. . . but. . .”
And then sleep once more was not to be had by this poor searcher who had made a too wonderful discovery. . . Horrid pictures of babies crying for the water their strangled throats would not let them drink—children killed by his own hands—such visions floated before him in the dark. . .
For a moment the actor, the maker of grand theatric gestures, rose in him again: “I am much inclined to begin on myself—inoculating myself with rabies, and then arresting the consequences; for I am beginning to feel very sure of my results,” he wrote to his old friend, Jules Vercel.
At last, mercifully, the worried Mrs. Meister from Meissengott in Alsace took the dreadful decision out of Pasteur's unsure hands. This woman came crying into the laboratory, leading her nine-year-old boy, Joseph, gashed in fourteen places two days before by a mad dog. He was a pitifully whimpering, scared boy—hardly able to walk.
“Save my little boy—Mr. Pasteur,” this woman begged him.
Pasteur told the woman to come back at five in the evening, and meanwhile he went to see the two physicians, Vulpian and Grancher—admirers who had been in his laboratory, who had seen the perfect way in which Pasteur could guard dogs from rabies after they had been terribly bitten. That evening they went with him to see the boy, and when Vulpian saw the angry festering wounds he urged Pasteur to start his inoculations: “Go ahead,” said Vulpian, “if you do nothing it is almost sure that he will die.”
And that night of July 6, 1885, they made the first injection of the weakened microbes of hydrophobia into a human being. Then, day after day, the boy Meister went without a hitch through his fourteen injections—which were only slight pricks of the hypodermic needle into his skin.
And the boy went home to Alsace and had never a sign of that dreadful disease.
Then all fears left Pasteur—it was very much like the case of that first dog that Roux had injected years before, against the master's wishes. So it was now with human beings; once little Meister came through unhurt, Pasteur shouted to the world that he was prepared to guard the people of the world from hydrophobia. This one case had completely chased his fears, his doubts—those vivid but not very deep-lying doubts of the artist that was in Louis Pasteur.
The tortured bitten people of the world began to pour into the laboratory of the miracle-man of the Rue d'Ulm. Research for a moment came to an end in the messy small suite of rooms, while Pasteur and Roux and Chamber-land sorted out polyglot crowds of mangled ones, babbling in a score of tongues: “Pasteur—save us!”
And this man who was no physician—who used to say with proud irony: “I am only a chemist,”—this man of science who all his life had wrangled bitterly with doctors, answered these cries and saved them. He shot his complicated, illogical fourteen doses of partly weakened germs of rabies—unknown microbes of rabies—into them and sent these people healthy back to the four corners of the earth.
From Smolensk in Russia came nineteen peasants, moujiks who had been set upon by a mad wolf nineteen days before, and five of them were so terribly mangled they could not walk at all, and had to be taken to the Hotel Dieu. Strange figures in fur caps they came, saying: “Pasteur—Pasteur,” and this was the only word of French they knew.
Then Paris went mad—as only Paris can—with excited concern about these bitten Russians who must surely die—it was so long since they had been attack
ed—and the town talked of nothing else while Pasteur and his men started their injections. The chances of getting hydrophobia from the bites of mad wolves are eight out of ten: out of these nineteen Russians, fifteen were sure to die. . .
“Maybe,” said every one, “they will all die—it is more than two weeks since they were attacked, poor fellows; the malady must have a terrible start, they have no chance. . . ” Such was the gabble of the Boulevards.
Perhaps, indeed, it was too late. Pasteur could not eat nor did he sleep at all. He took a terrible risk, and morning and night, twice as quickly as he had ever made the fourteen injections—twice a day to make up for lost time—he and his men shot the vaccine into the arms of the Russians.
And at last a great shout of pride went up for this man Pasteur, went up from the Parisians, and all of France and all the world raised a paean of thanks to him—for the vaccine marvelously saved all but three of the doomed peasants. The moujiks returned to Russia and were welcomed with the kind of awe that greets the return of hopeless sick ones who have been healed at some miraculous shrine. And the Tsar of All the Russias sent Pasteur the diamond cross of St. Anne, and a hundred thousand francs to start the building of that house of microbe hunters in the Rue Dutot in Paris—that laboratory now called the Institut Pasteur. From all over the world—it was the kind of burst of generosity that only great disasters usually call out—from every country in the earth came money, piling up into millions of francs for the building of a laboratory in which Pasteur might have everything needed to track down other deadly microbes, to invent weapons against them. . .
The laboratory was built, but Pasteur's own work was done; his triumph was too much for him; it was a kind of trigger, perhaps, that snapped the strain of forty years of never before heard-of ceaseless searching. He died in 1895 in a little house near the kennels where they now kept his rabid dogs, at Villeneuve 1'Etang, just outside of Paris. His end was that of the devout Catholic, the mystic he had always been. In one hand he held a crucifix and in the other lay the hand of the most patient, obscure and important of his collaborators—Madame Pasteur. Around him, too, were Roux and Chamberland and those other searchers he had worn to tatters with his restless energy, those faithful ones he had abased, whom he had above all inspired; and these men who had risked their lives in the carrying out of his wild forays against death would now have died to save him, if they could.
That was the perfect end of this so human, so passionately imperfect hunter of microbes and saver of lives.
But there is another end of his career that I like to think of more—and that was the day, in 1892, of Pasteur's seventieth birthday—when a medal was given to him at a great meeting held to honor him, at the Sorbonne in Paris. Lister was there, and many other famous men from other nations, and in tier upon tier, above these magnificoes who sat in the seats of honor, were the young men of France—the students of the Sorbonne and the colleges and the high schools. There was a great buzz of young voices—all at once a hush, as Pasteur limped up the aisle, leaning on the arm of the President of the French Republic. And then—it is the kind of business that is usually pulled off to welcome generals and that kind of hero who has directed the futile butchering of thousands of enemies—the band of the Republican Guard blared out into a triumphal march.
Lister, the prince of surgeons, rose from his seat and hugged Pasteur and the gray-bearded important men and the boys in the top galleries cried and shook the walls with the roar of their cheering. At last the old microbe hunter gave his speech—the voice of the fierce arguments was gone and his son had to speak it for him—and his last words were a hymn of hope, not so much for the saving of life as a kind of religious cry for a new way of life for men. It was to the students, to the boys of the high schools he was calling:
“. . .Do not let yourselves be tainted by a deprecating and barren skepticism, do not let yourselves be discouraged by the sadness of certain hours which pass over nations. Live in the serene peace of laboratories and libraries. Say to yourselves first: What have I done for my instruction? and, as you gradually advance, What have I done for my country? until the time comes when you may have the immense happiness of thinking that you have contributed in some way to the progress and good of humanity. . .”
6. ROUX AND BEHRING:
Massacre the Guinea-Pigs
1
It was to save babies that they killed so many guinea-pigs!
Ėmile Roux, the fanatical helper of Pasteur, in 1888 took up the tools his master had laid down, and started on searches of his own. In a little while he discovered a strange poison seeping from the bacillus of diphtheria—one ounce of the pure essence of this stuff was enough to kill seventy-five thousand big dogs. A few years later, while Robert Koch was bending under the abuse and curses of sad ones who had been disappointed by his supposed cure for consumption, Emil Behring, the poetical pupil of Koch, spied out a strange virtue, an unknown something in the blood of guinea-pigs. It could make that powerful diphtheria poison completely harmless. . . These two Emils revived men's hopes after Koch's disaster, and once more people believed for a time that microbes were going to be turned from assassins into harmless little pets.
What experiments these two young men made to discover this diphtheria antitoxin! They went at it frantic to save lives; they groped at it among bizarre butcherings of countless guinea-pigs; in the evenings their laboratories were shambles like the battlefields of old days when soldiers were mangled by spears and pierced by arrows. Roux dug ghoulishly into the spleens of dead children—Behring bumped his nose in the darkness of his ignorance against facts the gods themselves could not have predicted. For each brilliant experiment these two had to pay with a thousand failures.
But they discovered the diphtheria antitoxin.
They never could have done it without the modest discovery of Frederick Loeffler. He was that microbe hunter whose mustache was so militaristic that he had to keep pulling it down to see through his microscope; he sat working at Koch's right hand in that brave time when the little master was tracking down the tubercle bacillus. It was in the early eighteen eighties, and diphtheria, which several times each hundred years seems to have violent ups and downs of viciousness—diphtheria was particularly murderous then. The wards of the hospitals for sick children were melancholy with a forlorn wailing; there were gurgling coughs foretelling suffocation; on the sad rows of narrow beds were white pillows framing small faces blue with the strangling grip of an unknown hand. Through these rooms walked doctors trying to conceal their hopelessness with cheerfulness; powerless they went from cot to cot—trying now and again to give a choking child its breath by pushing a tube into its membrane-plugged windpipe. . .
Five out of ten of these cots sent their tenants to the morgue.
Below in the dead house toiled Frederick Loeffler, boiling knives, heating platinum wires red hot and with them lifting grayish stuff from the still throats of those bodies the doctors had failed to keep alive; and this stuff he put into slim tubes capped with white fluffs of cotton, or he painted it with dyes, which showed him, through his microscope, that there were queer bacilli shaped like Indian clubs in those throats, microbes which the dye painted with pretty blue dots and stripes and bars. In nearly every throat he discovered these strange bacilli; he hurried to show them to his master, Koch.
There is little doubt Koch led Loeffler by the hand in this discovery. “There is no use to jump at conclusions,” you can hear Koch telling him. “You must grow these microbes pure—then you must inject the cultivations into animals. . . If those beasts come down with a disease exactly like human diphtheria, then. . . ” How could Loeffler have gone wrong, with that terribly pedantic, but careful, truth-hunting little czar of microbe hunters squinting at him from behind those eternal spectacles?
One dead child after another Loeffler examined; he poked into every part of each pitiful body; he stained a hundred different slices of every organ; he tried—and quickly succeeded—in growing tho
se queer barred bacilli pure. But everywhere he searched, in every part of each body, he found no microbes—except in the membrane-cluttered throat. And always here, in every child but one or two, he came on those Indian club-shaped rods. “How can these few microbes, growing nowhere in the body but the throat—how can these few germs, staying in that one place, kill a child so quickly?” pondered Loeffler. “But I must follow Herr Koch's directions!” and he proceeded to shoot the germs of his pure cultivations into the windpipes of rabbits and beneath the skins of guinea-pigs. Quickly these animals died—in two or three days, like a child, or even more quickly—but the microbes, which Loeffler had shot into them in millions, could only be found at the spot where he had injected them. . . And sometimes there were none to be found even here, or at best a few feeble ones hardly strong enough, you would think, to hurt a flea. . .
“But how is it these few bacilli—sticking in one little corner of the body—how can they topple over a beast a million times larger than they are themselves?” asked Loeffler.
Never was there a more conscientious searcher than this Loeffler, nor one with less of a wild imagination to liven—or to spoil—his almost automatic exactness. He sat himself down; he wrote a careful scientific paper; it was modest, it was cold, it was not hopeful, it was a most unlawyer-like report reciting all of the fors and againsts on the question of whether or no this new bacillus was the cause of diphtheria. He leaned over backward to be honest—he put last the facts that were against it! “This microbe may be the cause,” you can hear him mumbling as he wrote, “but in a few children dead of diphtheria I could not find these germs. . . none of my inoculated animals get paralysis as children do. . . what is most against me is that I've discovered this same microbe—it was vicious against guinea-pigs and rabbits tool—in the throat of a child with never a sign of diphtheria.”
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