CHAPTER V PASTEUR AND THE MAD DOG I Do not think for a moment that Pasteur allowed his fame and name to be forgotten in the excitement kicked up by the sensational proofs of Koch that microbes murder men. It is certain that less of a hound for sniffing out microbes, less of a poet, less of a master at keeping people wide-eyed with their mouths open, would have been shoved off into a fairly complete oblivion by such events--but not Pasteur! It was in the late eighteen-seventies--Koch had just swept the German doctors off their feet by his fine discovery of the spores of anthrax--that Pasteur who was only a chemist, had the effrontery to dismiss with a grunt, a shrug, and a wave of his hand, the ten thousand years of experience of doctors in studying and fighting diseases. At this time, in spite of Semmelweis, the Austrian who had proved child-bed fever was contagious, the Lying-In hospitals of Paris were pest-holes. Out of every nineteen women who went hopeful into their doors, one was sure to die of child-bed fever, to leave her baby motherless. One of these places, where ten young mothers perished in succession, was called the House of Crime. Women hardly dared to trust themselves to the most expensive physicians; they were beginning to boycott the hospitals. Large numbers of them--with reason--no longer cared to risk the grim danger of having babies. Even the doctors themselves--accustomed though they were helplessly but sympathetically to preside at the demise of their patients--even the physicians themselves, I say, were scandalized at this dreadful presence of death at the birth of new life. One day, at the Academy of Medicine in Paris, a famous physician was holding an oration, with plenty of long Greek and elegant Latin words, on the cause--alas, completely unknown to him--of child-bed fever. Suddenly one of his learned and stately sentences was interrupted by a voice bellowing from the rear of the hall: “The thing that kills women with child-bed fever--it isn’t anything like that! It is you doctors that carry deadly microbes from sick women to healthy ones...!” It was Pasteur who said this; he was out of his seat; his eyes flamed excitement. “Possibly you are right, but I fear you will never find that microbe----” The orator tried to start his speech again, but by this time Pasteur was charging up the aisle, dragging his partly paralyzed left leg behind him a little. He reached the blackboard, grabbed a piece of chalk and shouted to the annoyed orator and the scandalized Academy: “You say I will not find the microbe? Man, I have found it! Here’s the way it looks!” And Pasteur scrawled a chain of little circles on the blackboard. The meeting broke up in confusion.