Pasteur's life and work in relation to the advancement of medical science.

  • Stimson, Lewis Atterbury, 1844-1917.
Date:
1893
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Pasteur's life and work in relation to the advancement of medical science. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by the Augustus C. Long Health Sciences Library at Columbia University and Columbia University Libraries/Information Services, through the Medical Heritage Library. The original may be consulted at the the Augustus C. Long Health Sciences Library at Columbia University and Columbia University.

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    number of those who had been bitten and haci not been treated by inoculation. In addition to these 201 Parisians more than 1,300 other patients, coming from greater or less distances, were treated at the Institut Pasteur during the year, and similar institutions have been at work in seventeen other cities. It would be interesting and profitable to study in detail the means and the methods by which these vast results have been obtained, but time forbids more than a brief reference to them. Of his method, the experimental method, which he used with such transcendent skill; the method handed down to us by the great experimenters of the past—Gali- leo, Pascal, Newton—he has given us a description and an appreciation. Admirable and sovereign method, he calls it, which is always guided and controlled by ob- servation and experience freed from every metaph3^sical conclusion ; a method so fruitful that great minds, dazzled by its conquests, have believed that it could solve all problems. One can do nothing without preconceived ideas, but we must have the wisdom to believe in their deductions only so far as experience confirms them. Preconceived ideas, under the rigid control of experimentation, are the vivifying flame of the sciences of observation ; their dan- ger is in fixed ideas. Do you remember Bossuet's fine saying : ' The greatest disordering of the mind is to be- lieve that things are because one wishes them to be ' ? To enter upon a path, and to stop every moment to make sure you are not going astray—that is the true method. In these impatient times such a method seems all too slow ; but see how far and how safely it has taken him. Doubtless his mistakes, his false routes, might be counted b}^ thousands; but he himself detected and corrected them, and no step definitively taken has ever had to be retraced, no statement that he has ever made has proved to be incorrect. His caution in approaching a conclusion is equalled only by his assurance after it has been reached ;