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It was Theobald Smith who made mankind turn a corner. He was the first, and remains the captain of American microbe hunters. He poked his nose—following the reasoning of some plain farmers—around a sharp turn and came upon amazing things; and now this history tells what Smith saw and what the trail-breakers who came after him found.

"It is in the power of man to make parasitic maladies disappear from the face of the globe!” So promised Pasteur, palsied but famous after his fight with the sicknesses of silkworms. He promised that, you remember, with a kind of enthusiastic vehemence, making folks think they might be rid of plagues by a year after next at the latest. Men began to hope and wait. . . . They cheered as Pasteur invented vaccines—marvelous these were but not what you would call microbe-exterminators. Then Koch came, to astound men by his perilous science of finding the tubercle bacillus, and, though Koch promised little, men remembered Pasteur's prophecy and waited for consumption to vanish. . . . Years went by while Roux and Behring battled bloodily to scotch the poison of diphtheria; mothers crooned hopeful songs into the ears of their children. . . . Some men giggled, but secretly hoped a little too, that the mighty (albeit windy) Metchnikoff might teach his phagocytes to eat up every germ in the world. . . . Diseases were getting a bit milder maybe—the reason is still mysterious—but they seemed in no hurry to vanish, and men had to keep on waiting. . . .