Dr. Pidoux, an ideal representative of traditional medicine, with his gold-buttoned blue coat and his reputation equally great in Paris and at the Eaux-Bonnes, declared that the idea of specificity was a fatal thought. Himself a pillar of the doctrine of diathesis and of the morbid spontaneity of the organism, he exclaimed in some much applauded speeches: “Tuberculosis! but that is the common result of a quantity of divers external and internal causes, not the product of a specific agent ever the same!” Was not this disease to be looked upon as “one and multiple at the same time, bringing the same final conclusion, the necrobiotic and infecting destruction of the plasmatic tissue of an organ by a number of roads which the hygienist and physician must endeavour to close?” Where would these specificity doctrines lead to? “Applied to chronic diseases, these doctrines condemn us to the research of specific remedies or vaccines, and all progress is arrested.... Specificity immobilizes medicine.” These phrases were reproduced by the medical press. The bacillus of tuberculosis had not been discovered by Villemin; it was only found and isolated much later, in 1882, by Dr. Koch; but Villemin suspected the existence of a virus. In order to demonstrate the infectious nature of tuberculosis, he experimented on animals, multiplying inoculations; he took the sputum of tuberculous patients, spread it on cotton wool, dried it, and then made the cotton wool into a bed for little guinea-pigs, who became tuberculous. Pidoux answered these precise facts by declaring that Villemin was fascinated by inoculation, adding ironically, “Then all we doctors have to do is to set out nets to catch the sporules of tuberculosis, and find a vaccine.” That sudden theory of phthisis, falling from the clouds, resembled Pasteur’s theory of germs floating in air. Was it not better, urged Pidoux the heterogenist, to remain in the truer and more philosophical doctrine of spontaneous generation? “Let us believe, until the contrary is proved, that we are right, we partisans of the common etiology of phthisis, partisans of the spontaneous tuberculous degeneration of the organism under the influence of accessible causes, which we seek everywhere in order to cut down the evil in its roots.”