Alas for her, this new microscope, this plaything, took her husband on more curious adventures than any he would have met in Tahiti or Lahore; and these weird experiences--that Pasteur had dreamed of but which no man had ever had before--came on him out of the dead carcasses of sheep and cows. These new sights and adventures jumped at him impossibly on his very doorstep, and in his own drug-reeking office that he was so tired of, that he was beginning to loathe. “I hate this bluff that my medical practice is ... it isn’t because I do not _want_ to save babies from diphtheria ... but mothers come to me crying--asking me to save their babies--and what can I do?--Grope ... fumble ... reassure them when I know there is no hope.... How can I cure diphtheria when I do not even know what causes it, when the wisest doctor in Germany doesn’t know?...” So you can imagine Koch complaining bitterly to Emmy, who was irritated and puzzled, and thought that it was a young doctor’s business to do as well as he could with the great deal of knowledge that he had got at the medical school--oh! would he never be satisfied? But Koch was right. What, indeed, did doctors know about the mysterious causes of disease? Pasteur’s experiments were brilliant, but they had proved nothing about the how and why of human sicknesses. Pasteur was a trail-blazer, a fore-runner crying possible future great victories over disease, shouting about magnificent stampings out of epidemics; but meanwhile the moujiks of desolate towns in Russia were still warding off scourges by hitching four widows to a plow and with them drawing a furrow round their villages in the dead of night--and their doctors had no sounder protection to offer them. “But the professors, the great doctors in Berlin, Robert, they must know what is the cause of these sicknesses you don’t know how to stop.” So Frau Koch might have tried to console him. But in 1873--that is only fifty years ago--I must repeat that the most eminent doctors had not one bit better explanation for the causes of epidemics than the ignorant Russian villagers who hitched the town widows to their plows. In Paris Pasteur was preaching that microbes would soon be found to be the murderers of consumptives: and against this crazy prophet rose the whole corps of the doctors of Paris, headed by the distinguished brass-buttoned Doctor Pidoux. “What!” roared this Pidoux, “consumption due to a germ--one definite kind of germ? Nonsense! A fatal thought! Consumption is one and many at the same time. Its conclusion is the necrobiotic and infecting destruction of the plasmatic tissue of an organ by a number of roads that the hygienist and the physician must endeavor to close!” It was so that the doctors fought Pasteur’s prophecies with utterly meaningless and often idiotic words. II