Is some action, which is becoming mote intense as we

approach the final inoculation, which will take place on

Thursday, July 16. The lad is very well this morning and

has slept well, though slightly restless; he has a good

appetite and no feverishness. He Had a slight hysterical

attack yesterday\".

The letter ended with an affectionate invitation.

\"Perhaps one of the great medical facts of the century is

going to take place; you would regret not having seen it!\"

Pasteur was going through a succession of hopes,

fears, anguish, and an ardent yearning to snatch little

Meister from death; he could no longer work. At nights,

feverish visions came to him of his; child whom he had

seen playing in the garden, suffocating in the mad

struggles of hydrophobia, like the dying child he had seen at

-the Hospital Trousseau in 1880. Vainly his experimental

genius assured him that the virus of that most terrible of

diseases was about to be vanquished, that humanity was

about to be delivered from, this dread horror — his human

tenderness was stronger than all, his accustomed ready

sympathy for the sufferings and anxieties of others was

nonce centered in \"the dear lad\".

The treatment lasted ten days; Meister was inoculated

twelve times.

Cured from his wounds, delighted with all he saw,

gaily running about as if he had been in his own Alsatian

farm; little Meister, whose blue eyes now showed neither

fear.nor shyness, merrily, received the last inoculation;

in the evening after claiming я kiss from \"Dear Monsieur

Pasteur\", as he called him, he went to bed and slept

peacefully. Pasteur spent a terrible night of insomnia;

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in those slow, dark hours of night, when all vision is

distorted, Pasteur, losing sight of the accumulation of

experiments which guaranteed his success, imagined that

the little boy would die.

The treatment being now completed, Pasteur left

little Meister to the care of Dr. Grancher (the lad was not

to return to Alsace until July 27) and consented to take

a few days' rest. He spent them with his daughter in a

quiet, almost deserted country place in Burgundy, but

without, however, finding much restfulness in the beautiful

peaceful scenery; he lived in constant expectation of

Dr. Grancher's daily telegram or letter containing news

of Joseph Meister.

By the time he went to the Hura, Pasteur's fears

had almost disappeared. He wrote from Arbois to his son

August 3, 1885: \"Very good news last night of the bitten

lad. I am looking forward with great hopes to the time

when I can draw a conclusion. It will be, thirty-one days

tomorrow since he was bitten\".

\"The Amazing World of Medicine\"

by Wright and Rapport

150th Anniversary of Louis Pasteur's birth

By Academician A. Imshenetsky

Louis Pasteur was born-on December 27, 1822, in the

small French town of Dole iptq, the family of one of

Napoleon's retired soldiers. With his name is linked a whole

number of sciences. Louis Pasteur's research into

molecular dissymmetry laid the foundation for the science

of stereochemistry; he experimentally proved

impossibility of the spontaneous generation of living organisms;

initiated asepsis in surgery and led to the' development

of the canning industry.

Research into the agents causing various fermentations

and the transformation of different substances under

natural conditions made microbiology an independent

science. Pasteur regarded fermentatibn as a biological

process, and as a change in the metabolism of bacteria

and yeast in the absence of air or free oxygen. The very

fact of the discovery of anaerobic microorganisms

168 .

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tely refuted the previously unassailable proposition that

life was not possible without oxygen.

Each fermentation has a causative agent of its own,

and one species* of microorganisms does not change into

any other species. These firmly established facts underlie

the modern conception that each contagion or disease in

a man or animal has a concrete pathogenic agent of its*

own. Louis Pasteur completely refuted the theory of the

spontaneous generation of diseases. He aTso did the first

research into the changeability of microorganisms. He

proved that cultures of pathogenic microbes could produce

forms which lose their ability to induce a disease but when

introduced into the organism of a living being made it

resistant to the disease in question. The prevention

vaccination of animals against anthrax and other diseases

helped Pa$teur to create his method of preventive

vaccination.

However, his method of vaccination against rabies was

the most outstanding of his accomplishments, and shows

with exceptional clarity the, great genius of this man. True,

he did not find the pathogenic agent causing the rabies,

for it is brought about by a virus, and there was no such

science as virology in his day. However, utilizing the fact

that rabies has a prolonged incubatron period, the

scientist proposed to inoculate a person bitten by a mad dog

with increasing dozes of the rabies infective agent, taken

from the spinal cord of the dead rabbit in which rabies

had been artificially induced. Thanks to these vaccinations,

the bitten person became immune to rabies before the