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To my mind it would be just as reasonable to say that germs cause health, and I defy any bacteriologist to prove that micro-organisms cause disease any more than they cause health; and if he can't prove that germs are more pathologic than they are physiologic, but does succeed in proving that they are equally important to health and to disease, we can agree to that equal importance and should be able to go on agreeing and declare that if germs are the cause of disease they must also cause health and it is our duty to spend at least a part of our professional time in cultivating health germs.
It was only in 1856 that the method of transmission of the disease was clearly recognized, and in 1880 that the bacillus was discovered and identified by the bacteriologist Eberth, whose name it bears, so that it is only within the last thirty years that real weapons have been put into our hands with which to begin a fight of extermination against the disease.
Then he staggered back, and stood trembling, clinging to the rail with both hands. His lips moved, but no words came to them. Down below was the sound of voices and running steps. The clangour of rolling in the shed ceased abruptly. "This again," said the Bacteriologist, slipping a glass slide under the microscope, "is well, a preparation of the Bacillus of cholera the cholera germ."
"Those have been stained and killed," said the Bacteriologist. "I wish, for my own part, we could kill and stain every one of them in the universe." "I suppose," the pale man said, with a slight smile, 'that you scarcely care to have such things about you in the living in the active state?" "On the contrary, we are obliged to," said the Bacteriologist.
He passed out of the room reiterating his thanks, and the Bacteriologist accompanied him to the door, and then returned thoughtfully along the passage to his laboratory. He was musing on the ethnology of his visitor. Certainly the man was not a Teutonic type nor a common Latin one. "A morbid product, anyhow, I am afraid," said the Bacteriologist to himself.
Major Rankin, a first rate pathologist and bacteriologist of the government of Alberta, had been in charge of the government laboratory at Siam for five years previous to the war, and knew tropical medicine like a book, while Captain Ellis had carried on research work for three years in the Rockefeller hospital laboratories in New York and was thoroughly conversant with all the most recent work in vaccine and serum therapy.
The Bacteriologist, hatless, and in his carpet slippers, was running and gesticulating wildly towards this group. One slipper came off, but he did not wait for it. "He has gone mad!" said Minnie; "it's that horrid science of his"; and, opening the window, would have called after him. The slender man, suddenly glancing round, seemed struck with the same idea of mental disorder.
Wanhope regarded us all three, in this play of our qualities, with the scientific impartiality of a bacteriologist in the study of a culture offering some peculiar incidents. He took up a point as remote as might be from the personal appeal. "It is curious how little we know of such matters, after all the love-making and marrying in life and all the inquiry of the poets and novelists."
And the most powerful factor in this development, its indispensable basis, in fact, has been the invention of instruments of precision the microscope, the fever thermometer, the stethoscope, the ophthalmoscope, the test-tube, the culture medium, the triumphs of the bacteriologist and of the chemist.
For the cure we are again indebted to that excellent Hun bacteriologist Ehrlich, who gave us .606 a strong arsenical preparation that we dissolve in a pint of salt solution, and inject into the veins at the height of the paroxysm of fever.
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