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It was to save babies that they killed so many guinea-pigs!

Émile Roux, the fanatical helper of Pasteur, in 1888 took up the tools his master had laid down, and started on searches of his own. In a little while he discovered a strange poison seeping from the bacillus of diphtheria—one ounce of the pure essence of this stuff was enough to kill seventy-five thousand big dogs. A few years later, while Robert Koch was bending under the abuse and curses of sad ones who had been disappointed by his supposed cure for consumption, Emil Behring, the poetical pupil of Koch, spied out a strange virtue, an unknown something in the blood of guinea-pigs. It could make that powerful diphtheria poison completely harmless. . . . These two Emils revived men's hopes after Koch's disaster, and once more people believed for a time that microbes were going to be turned from assassins into harmless little pets.

What experiments these two young men made to discover this diphtheria antitoxin! They went at it frantic to save lives; they groped at it among bizarre butcherings of countless guinea-pigs; in the evenings their laboratories were shambles like the battlefields of old days when soldiers were mangled by spears and pierced by arrows. Roux dug ghoulishly into the spleens of dead children—Behring bumped his nose in the darkness of his ignorance against facts the gods themselves could not have predicted. For each brilliant experiment these two had to pay with a thousand failures.