Pasteur's life and work in relation to the advancement of medical science.

  • Lewis Atterbury Stimson
Date:
1893
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Pasteur's life and work in relation to the advancement of medical science. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by the Augustus C. Long Health Sciences Library at Columbia University and Columbia University Libraries/Information Services, through the Medical Heritage Library. The original may be consulted at the the Augustus C. Long Health Sciences Library at Columbia University and Columbia University.

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    each is absolute. His comments upon puerperal fever were made almost with an apology. I tell you these things, he said, as they appear to me. But I do not for- get that I am ignorant of medical science, and I earnestly ask for your judgment and your criticism. How different his tone when he felt himself master of the subject! What! he cried with magnificent scorn one day in the Academie de Medicine— what! Do you say that I may have worked twenty years on a subject and yet should hold no opinion on it ; that the right to verify, to control, to discuss, to interrogate, shall belong only to him who does nothing to throw light upon it, to him who, with his feet on the fender in his library, has only read, with more or less attention, the results of my labor ? You say that in the present state of science it is the part of wisdom to hold no opinion [on spontaneous generation]. Well, as for me, I hold one, for I have earned the right to hold it by twenty years of assiduous labor ; and it would be well for every impartial mind to share it. To those who were not aware of the thought and labor upon which it rested, such absolute confidence might seem foolhardy and arrogant; but those who tested it soon learned to respect it, and those who had once met hira in debate shrank from again falling into his redoubt- able hands. Come with me, said a man once— come with me to the Academy and see me strangle Pasteur. Take care, was the reply— take care, my friend. Pasteur is a man who makes no mistakes. Absolutely open and sincere, solicitous only that the truth should be known, he never hesitated to make public his reasons and his processes, to submit them to any open test, and to stand or fall by the result. When the dis- cussion on fermentation was at its height, Pasteur went in person to Munich to show his experiments to Liebig. When spontaneous generation was in question, Pouchet was invited to make experiments in concert with him. Challenged to a test upon a large scale of his proposed treatment of the silkworm disease, he had himself carried