In a culture in contact with air, only bacteridia developed, in a culture preserved from air, only the septic vibrio. What Pasteur called “the Paul Bert fact” now alone remained to be explained; this also was simple. The blood Paul Bert had received from Chartres was of the same quality as that which Jaillard and Leplat had had; that is to say already septic. If filaments of bacillus anthracis and of septic vibriones perish under compressed oxygen, such is not the case with the germs, which are extremely tenacious; they can be kept for several hours at a temperature of 70° C., and even of 95° C. Nothing injures them, neither lack of air, carbonic acid gas nor compressed oxygen. Paul Bert, therefore, killed filamentous bacteridia under the influence of high pressure; but, as the germs were none the worse, those germs revived the splenic fever. Paul Bert came to Pasteur’s laboratory, ascertained facts and watched experiments. On June 23, 1877, he hastened to the Société de Biologie and proclaimed his mistake, acting in this as a loyal Frenchman, Pasteur said. In spite of this testimony, and notwithstanding the admiration conceived for Pasteur by certain medical men--notably H. Gueneau de Mussy, who published in that very year (1877) a paper on the theory of the contagium germ and the application of that theory to the etiology of typhoid fever--the struggle was being continued between Pasteur and the current medical doctrines. In the long discussion which began at that time in the Académie de Médecine on typhoid fever, some masters of medical oratory violently attacked the germ theory, proclaiming the spontaneity of living organism. Typhoid fever, they said, is engendered by ourselves within ourselves. Whilst Pasteur was convinced that the day would come--and that was indeed the supreme goal of his life work--when contagious and virulent diseases would be effaced from the preoccupations, mournings and anxieties of humanity, and when the infinitesimally small, known, isolated and studied, would at last be vanquished, his ideas were called Utopian dreams. The old professors, whose career had been built on a combination of theories which they were pleased to call medical truth, dazed by such startling novelties, endeavoured, as did Piorry, to attract attention to their former writings. “It is not the disease, an abstract being,” said Piorry, “which we have to treat, but the patient, whom we must study with the greatest care by all the physical, chemical and clinical means which Science offers.”