at full flood, and where studies on rabies had already commenced, was now added a public life not less active. He must superintend the manufacture and the sending out of the vaccine wherever public or private experiments were made, must inquire into the results, details of which were never given in sufficient number or pre- cisely enough, must reply to the demands for information, to the fears which preceded an experiment, to the com- plaints which sometimes followed it. Pasteur carried on almost all this correspondence himself. He must also reply to criticisms and to sly attacks as well as to those of open war. Nor were his adversaries confined to France. Koch and his pupil, Löffler, for example, had published against the theory and practice of vaccina- tion some awkward and fruitless criticisms, which they must regret to-day. In this continual strife, Bouley made himself the champion of Pasteur and devoted his whole spirit to the task. Thanks to these prodigious efforts, thanks to the precision of the results, the practice of vaccination quickly became the custom, and when publishing, in 1894, in the Annales de l'Institut Pasteur, the statistics on anthrax vaccination on sheep and cattle, M. Chamber- land was able to state, that in the case of the former a total of 3,400,000 animals had been vaccinated in 10 years with a mortality of less than 1 per cent; in the case of the second, a total of 438,000 had been vacci- nated with a mortality of about 3 per thousand. Finally, he estimated the beneficial results for French agriculture from the use of vaccines at 5,000,000 francs for sheep, and 2,000,000 francs for cattle. It is evident that if the laboratory had been laboriously painstaking, it was not labor lost. It is anthrax vaccination that first spread through the public mind faith in the science of microbes. -293- |