Louis Pasteur : his life and labours / by his son-in-law ; tr. from the French by Lady Claud Hamilton ; with an introduction by John Tyndall.

Vallery-Radot, René, 1853-1933.

Date:: 1886

Credit: Louis Pasteur : his life and labours / by his son-in-law ; tr. from the French by Lady Claud Hamilton ; with an introduction by John Tyndall. 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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$tion of hvclrophobia ? Such was in fact the conclusion of Dr. Maurice Eaynaud, who, having been informed, at the same time as Pasteur, of the illness of the child, had made, on his own account, some experiments on rabbits. His rabbits were dead. Already a year previously j\I. Maurice Eaynaud had announced the transmission, by the saliva, of rabies from man to rabbits. ' We are, then, in the presence of a new fact of this kind,' he said, ' and we really beheve, until a proof to the contrary is given us, that these latter rabbits died of hydrophobia.' With his habitual prudence, and trusting more to the results of experiment than to medical observation alone, Pasteur was not in a hurry to form such positive conclusions. He began by doing what Dr. Mamice Piaynaud had neglected to do. He examined with the microscope the tissues and the blood of the rabbits inoculated in the laboratory; he discovered, both in those that were dead, and in those which were on the point of death, the presence of a special microbe, easily cultivable in a pure state and of which the successive cultures caused the death of other rabbits. Invariably, the same microbe appeared in the blood. As one or two days sufficed to cause death, hydrophobia could not have had time to make its appearance. Pasteur, moreover, found this same microbe in the saliva of children who had died of common maladies, and even in the normal saliva of$