THE MASTERY OF MICROBES.

Hokitika Guardian, 12 June 1920, Page 4

THE MASTERY OF MICROBES.

(By Stephen Paget, F.lt.G'.S., hon. sec Research Defence Society.)

It is just a quarter of a century since Pasteur died. I remember him well: the keen light in iiis eyes, the face deeply marked with care and work and sorrow and ill-health, the voice quiet and slow and grave. He is not only the greatest of all great Frenchmen: lie is also a man in whom was every virtue, under Heaven: and the whole world loves and reverences his memory. Lesser men make discoveries: lie made discoveries. He gave to mankind not isolated facts, but new principles of thought: lie revolu. lionised the study of the causes of diseases: lie brought us out of a wilderness of old theories: and his blessing seems to rest on all medicine and surgery.

He moved upward in the natural course of his work, through all creation. From the study of chemistry to the study of crystals: from crystals to lerments: from the study of the diseases of wines and beers to the study of the diseases ol silkworms: frome these, to the diseases of' poultry, swine, sheep, cattle and man.

lie changed the whole outlook qf medicine and surgery : he gave a new lease of life to the suffering world. For he discovered, and he taugl;|t men how to discover, the causes of things; the actual germs of diseases, the living agents, the things themselves: visible and recognisable under the microscope, or growing in a test-tube, or in the blood of al mouse, or in the blood of a mail \

And these germs, thus isolated and identified and grown in pure culture like plants in a greenhouse, could be observed and controlled: they could be warmed or chilled or fed-up or starved, or exposed to air and light or deprived of, air or light: a thousand changes could he played on them. The strength of them could be reduced, point by point: or heightened, point by point. Roux put it all in one sentence, “ See how far we have come, from the old metaphysical ideas about virulence, to these microbes that we can turn this way or that way—stuff so plastic that a man can work; on it and fashion it as lie likes.” Our younger men and women of science take it for granted; they never saw the dawn of Jlie new learning, the first wonder of diseases grown in testtubes, apart from the living body: tubercle and cholera and typhoid, pure and essential, bottle and cultivated and stnndarised and graduated. Of Pasteur’s immortal work, take only two instances: anthrax and rabies. Compared with anthrax, as it used to be, in France, Hungary, or the Argentine, anthrax in England is a mere trifle. Pasteur, by 1881, liad perfected his “ -ittenuatedy virus,” liis protective vaccine. In May 1881 at Pouillv-le-fort, near Melun, lie demonstrated the value of it. He took fifty sheep: hte protected five-and-twenty; he left live-and-twenty unprotected. On May 31fhe gave to them all a dose of anthrax germs at full virulence. Two days later, of the 25 sheep left to nature, 22 were dead, 2 were dying, 1 was sickening. Of the 25 protected, not one was dead or even ill., From then to now the vaccine has been in use over the whole civilised world. In 1906, Sir Stewart Stockman said:

“ Statistics collected in Hungary on over 11-J- millions of inoculated animals show that the results have been practically the same as in France. They talk of farms where the loss, which was 10 per cent., has been reduced to under 1 per cent.” Not many years ago Professor Beorcdka, of the Pasteur Institute, told me that the amount of the vaccine sent out from the institute was larger every year. We in England have little need of it ; but other countries were heavily scourged with the disease, and Pasteur was and is the saving of many millions of their sheep and cattle. By July 1885, after four years of incessant hard work on rabies—work differing in method but not in principle, from his work on anthrax —he had proved, over and over again, past all shadow of doubt that he could prevent a dog, bitten by a mad dog, from developing rabies. On July 6th, his first patient, the little boy from Alsace, Joseph Meister, was brought to him, bitten in fourteen places by a mad dog two days before. It is thirty-five years from then to now. All over the world thlis preventive treatment is in use, and will be so long as rabies is in the world. I saw two cases of hydroprobia some forty years ago and shall not forget them. We who live on an island stamped out rabies by muzzling and quarantine of dogs; and when it was re-imported in 1918 we stamped it out again. But you cannot muzzle all the stray dogs on the Continent, and all the pariah-dogs of India, and all the wolves of Russia. At tlie Pasteur Institutes all over the world these bitten patients are divided into three classes. In Class A the animals which inflicted the bites are proved to have been rabid, by the development of rabies in other animals bitten by them or inoculated from them. In Class B they are judged to have been rabid, by examination of their dead bodies. In Class C they are only suspected to have,, been rabid. The mortality from hydrophobia, even in Class A. is less than 1 percent.