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physicians themselves, I say, were scandalized at this dreadful presence of death at the birth of new life.

One day, at the Academy of Medicine in Paris, a famous physician was holding an oration, with plenty of long Greek and elegant Latin words, on the cause—alas, completely unknown to him—of child-bed fever. Suddenly one of his learned and stately sentences was interrupted by a voice bellowing from the rear of the hall:

"The thing that kills women with child-bed fever—it isn't anything like that! It is you doctors that carry deadly microbes from sick women to healthy ones . . . !" It was Pasteur who said this; he was out of his seat; his eyes flamed excitement.

"Possibly you are right, but I fear you will never find that microbe——" The orator tried to start his speech again, but by this time Pasteur was charging up the aisle, dragging his partly paralyzed left leg behind him a little. He reached the blackboard, grabbed a piece of chalk and shouted to the annoyed orator and the scandalized Academy:

"You say I will not find the microbe? Man, I have found it! Here’s the way it looks!" And Pasteur scrawled a chain of little circles on the blackboard. The meeting broke up in confusion.

Pasteur was in his late fifties now, but he was still as impetuous and enthusiastic as he had been at twenty-five. He had been a chemist and an expert on beet-sugar fermentations, he had shown the vintners how to keep their wines from spoiling, he had rushed from this job into the saving of sick silkworms, he had preached the slogan of Better Beer for France and had really made the French beer better; but during all these hectic years while he was doing the life work of a dozen men Pasteur dreamed about the tracking down of microbes that he knew must be the scourges of the human race, the authors of disease.

Then suddenly he found Koch had done the trick ahead of him. He must catch up with this Koch. "Microbes are in