Inoculations and the germ theory of disease : the suppressed memoir / by Dr. Leverson.

  • Montague Richard Leverson
Date:
1911
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Inoculations and the germ theory of disease : the suppressed memoir / by Dr. Leverson. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    point, he said: “ In all the questions I have had to treat, whether relating to fermentations or spontaneous generations, the word germ means the origin of life.’”’ You will find the term thus defined in Pasteur’s Etude sur la Biere, page 302. This was so late as the year 1876, after he had been bandying about the term germs for several years; replace the term germ by the phrase “ origin of life’ in his, writings, either before 1876 or after that date, and the inextricable contradiction and nonsense in which he was involved will become apparent. And now observe: The so-called germs of disease that is “origins of life, causing disease,” are asserted to be always present in the atmosphere in enormous quantities and to have existed there from the beginning of things ! This was a plagiarism of the discovery by Professor Béchamp of the presence in the air of “‘ little bodies,” living things, having fermentative power; distorted by Pasteur into germs of disease ! Now while Béchamp over and over again isolated his “ little bodies,”’ which he named microzymas, and affiliated with analagous “ little bodies ’’ to be found, as he and his collaborators demonstrated, in every living tissue they examined, neither Pasteur nor his followers, though often challenged to do so, ever isolated from the air a single germ of any disease whatever! They did find, in the air, bacteria of various forms (evolved as shewn by Béchamp, from microzymas), but they never succeeded in producing therefrom in a living body, the diseased condition of which they claimed it was the germ. Whenever they have produced a diseased condition in any living body by the inoculation of bacteria, the bacteria have been obtained from a diseased body, never under any circumstances from the air. A surgeon of the name of Paget, who is perambulating this country lecturing on Pasteur and the debt the world owes to him, thinks that he routs the opponents of the germ theory of disease by inviting them to allow him to inoculate them with a needle full of what he. says are yellow-fever or cholera or typhoid germs, but which really are the products of diseased conditions in living tissues ; and he really imagines that the refusal of the opponents of the germ theory to allow poisons thus procured, not from the air but from infected bodies, to be inoculated upon them, answers their denials of the germ theory of disease, or that such diseased germs can be obtained from the aiy! And that is not the whole of the absurdity, because he proposes to introduce this poison directly into the life stream by the dangerous practice of inoculation, a practice upon which I have already commented, and shall do so further presently, in connection with the diseased conditions of children,
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