Page:Microbe Hunters.djvu/206

This page has been validated.
180
PASTEUR

through his fourteen injections—which were only slight pricks of the hypodermic needle into his skin.

And the boy went home to Alsace and had never a sign of that dreadful disease.

Then all fears left Pasteur—it was very much like the case of that first dog that Roux had injected years before, against the master's wishes. So it was now with human beings; once little Meister came through unhurt, Pasteur shouted to the world that he was prepared to guard the people of the world from hydrophobia. This one case had completely chased his fears, his doubts—those vivid but not very deep-lying doubts of the artist that was in Louis Pasteur.

The tortured bitten people of the world began to pour into the laboratory of the miracle-man of the Rue d’Ulm. Research for a moment came to an end in the messy small suite of rooms, while Pasteur and Roux and Chamberland sorted out polyglot crowds of mangled ones, babbling in a score of tongues: "Pasteur—save us!"

And this man who was no physician—who used to say with proud irony: "I am only a chemist,"—this man of science who all his life had wrangled bitterly with doctors, answered these cries and saved them. He shot his complicated, illogical fourteen doses of partly weakened germs of rabies—unknown microbes of rabies—into them and sent these people healthy back to the four corners of the earth.

From Smolensk in Russia came nineteen peasants, moujiks who had been set upon by a mad wolf nineteen days before, and five of them were so terribly mangled they could not walk at all, and had to be taken to the Hotel Dieu. Strange figures in fur caps they came, saying: "Pasteur—Pasteur," and this was the only word of French they knew.

Then Paris went mad—as only Paris can—with excited concern about these bitten Russians who must surely die—it was so long since they had been attacked—and the town talked of nothing else while Pasteur and his men started their injections. The chances of getting hydrophobia from the bites of mad