Page 144 - Ethel D. Hume - Bešam ili Paster: Izgubljeno poglavlje u istoriji biologije

NATURE'S EXPERIMENTS 141

not seem established on any experimental reality, its
reception by these savants, who seem to me to have adopted
it without going sufficiently deeply into it, would have been
absolutely incomprehensible. Incontestable facts, how-
ever, seem to support it. Thus, it is certain that there truly
exist microscopic living beings of the most exquisite
minuteness, which, undoubtedly, can communicate the
specific diseased condition that is in them. The cause both
of the virulence and the power of infection in certain pro-
ducts of the sick organism, or of bodies in a state of putre-
faction after death, resides in reality in beings of this order.
It is true that people have certainly discovered such beings
during the development of certain complaints, virulent,
infectious, contagious or otherwise."
It is thus seen that it was Bechamp's belief that it is
this particle oftruth in the germ-theory that has blinded so
many to its errors. He explains that the want of a fuller
understanding is brought about by lack of sufficient
knowledge.
14 'In my eyes, it is because doctors have perceived no
relation, no connecting link, between certain histological
elements of the animal and vegetable organism and
bacteria that they have so lightly abandoned the laws of
the great science to adopt after Davaine, and with Pasteur,
Kircher's system of pre-existing disease-germs. Thus it
comes about that not understanding the real and essential
correlation existing between bacteria and the normal
histological elements of our organisation, like Davaine, or
denying it, like Pasteur, they have come newly again to
believe in the system of P. Kircher. Long before Davaine
made his observations and considered the inside of the
organism to be a medium for development of inoculated
—
bacteria, Raspail said: 'The organism does not engender
disease: it receives it from without. . . . Disease is an
effect ofwhich the active cause is external to the organism.'
In spite of this, the great physicians affirm, in Pidoux'
—
happy words: 'Disease is born of us and in us.' But M.
1
La Thiorie du Microzyma, p. 38.