As Pasteur advanced in these studies, he found at the Academy of Medicine some fellow labourers, who being keenly interested in such researches did all they could to promote them. Thus M. Villemin, the chief medical officer of the Val de Grâce (who had with so much sagacity discovered the contagion of tuberculosis) when typhoid fever was raging in Paris two years ago, never allowed a case of the fever to pass through his hands without informing Pasteur, who habitually went himself to collect specimens of the blood of those who had died. How numerous were the drops of blood thus enclosed in little tubes, and how frequent the attempts at cultivation, as yet without result, in the hope of finding the cause of a disease which claims so many victims! There is another malady to which Dr. Hervieux especially called Pasteur's attention, and by which so many women are attacked--puerperal fever. He went with M. Hervieux to the Maternity Hospital, to visit a woman under his charge who had contracted puerperal fever some days after her confinement. By means of a pin a prick was made in the forefinger of the left hand, which had been washed previously with dilute alcohol and carbolic acid, and dried with singed linen. The drop of blood taken in this way was sown in an infusion of fowl. For some days the cultivation remained sterile. Next day blood was taken from a fresh puncture, and this time it proved fertile. The woman died three days after. The blood, therefore, already at the time when Pasteur had taken it, three days at least before death, contained a microscopic parasite capable of cultivation. Eighteen hours before this woman died, some blood taken from the left foot had been sown, and, like the former, it had proved productive; but--and this fact deserves to be noted--while the first productive cultivation only contained a microbe resembling that of boils, the other cultivation contained long flexible chaplets clustered together like tangled strings of beads. At the post-mortem examination of this woman large quantities of pus were found in the peritoneum and the uterus. This pus was sown with all due precaution. Some blood taken from the basilic and femoral veins was likewise sown. It was everywhere easy to recognise the long chaplets in little tangled parcels, and always without admixture of other organisms, except in the cultivation of the peritoneal pus, which, besides the long strings of grains, showed also the little pyogenic vibrios to which Pasteur had already assigned the name of the pus organism.