Pasteur, with the simplicity which contrasted with his extraordinary powers, supposed that, if he were armed with diplomas, he would have greater authority to direct Medicine towards the study of the conditions of existence of phenomena, and--correlatively to the traditional method of observation, which consists in knowing and describing exactly the course of the disease--to inspire practitioners with the desire to prevent and to determine its cause. An unexpected offer went some way towards filling what he considered as a blank. At the beginning of the year 1873, a place was vacant in the section of the Free Associates of the Academy of Medicine. He was asked to stand for it, and hastened to accept. He was elected with a majority of only one vote, though he had been first on the section’s list. The other suffrages were divided between Messrs. Le Roy de Méricourt, Brochin, Lhéritier, and Bertillon. Pasteur, as soon as he was elected, promised himself that he would be a most punctual academician. It was on a Tuesday in April that he attended his first meeting. As he walked towards the desk allotted to him, his paralyzed left leg dragging a little, no one among his colleagues suspected that this quiet and unassuming new member would become the greatest revolutionary ever known in Medicine. One thing added to Pasteur’s pleasure in being elected--the fact that he would join Claude Bernard. The latter had often felt somewhat forlorn in that centre, where some hostility was so often to be seen towards all that was outside the Clinic. This was the time when the “princes of science,” or those who were considered as such, were all physicians. Every great physician was conscious of being a ruling power. The almost daily habit of advising and counselling was added to that idea of haughty or benevolent superiority to the rest of the world; and, accustomed to dictate his wishes, the physician frequently adopted an authoritative tone and became a sort of personage. “Have you noticed,” said Claude Bernard to Pasteur with a smile under which many feelings were hidden, “that, when a doctor enters a room, he always looks as if he was going to say, ‘I have just been saving a fellow-man’?”