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In the excitement of this cure, those sad ones, who had lost dear ones through the first enthusiasm about the dangerous injections of the consumption cure of Koch, forgot their sorrow and forgave Koch because of his brilliant pupil Behring.

But there were still criticisms and muttered complaints, and this was natural, for the serum was no sure-fire, one hundred per cent curative stuff for babies—any more than it was for guinea-pigs. Then too, learned doctors pointed out that what happened under the hide of a guinea-pig was not the same—necessarily—as the savage thing going on in the throat of a child. Thousands of children were getting the diphtheria serum, but some children (maybe not so many as before perhaps?) kept dying horribly in spite of it. Doctors questioned. . . . Some parents had their hopes dashed. . . .

Then Émile Roux came back into the battle. He discovered brilliantly an easy way to make horses immune to the poison—they did not die, they developed no horrid abscesses, and, best of all, they furnished great gallon bottles full of the precious antitoxin—powerful stuff this serum was; little bits of it destroyed large doses of that poison fatal to so many big dogs.

Like Behring—perhaps he was even more passionately sure than Behring—Roux believed in advance this antitoxin would save suffering children from death. He thought nothing of prevention, he forgot about his gargles. He hurried to and fro between his workroom and the stables, carrying big-bellied flasks, jabbing needles into those patient horse's necks. Just then, a particularly virulent breed (so Roux thought) of diphtheria bacillus was crawling through the homes of Paris. At the Hospital for Sick Children, fifty out of every hundred children (at least the statistics said so) were being carried blue-faced to the morgue. At the Hospital Trousseau as many as sixty out of a hundred were dying (but it is not clear whether the doctors there knew all these deaths to be from diphtheria).