Page 24 - Ethel D. Hume - Bešam ili Paster: Izgubljeno poglavlje u istoriji biologije

ANTOINE BfiCHAMP 21
of his admirer and future collaborator, Professor Estor, a
physiologist and histologist, who combined the duties of
physician and surgeon at the Montpellier Hospital.
Bechamp, also, had the advantage ofmedical training, and
though he never practised as a doctor, his pathological
studies were continuous and he was daily in touch with the
work of physicians and surgeons, such as Courty, besides
Estor, and himself took full advantage of the experience to
be obtained in hospital wards. His and Estor's more
theoretical studies were checked and enlarged by their
intimacy with the vast experiments that Nature carries out
in disease. Both were men accustomed to the strictness of
the experimental methods of Lavoisier and their clinical
and laboratory work moved side by side, the one confirm-
ing and establishing the other.
Without ever neglecting his professorial duties,
sufficiently/arduous to absorb the whole time of an ordin-
ary mortal, Bechamp yet laboured incessantly, both by
himself and with Professor Estor, at the problems that his
researches were developing. A little band of pupils
gathered about them, helping them, while far into the
night constantly worked the two enthusiasts, often, as
1
Bechamp tells us, quite awestruck by the wonderful con-
firmation of their ideas and verification of their theories.
Such toil could only be continued by one possessed of
Professor Bechamp's exuberant health and vitality, and it
possibly told upon Professor Estor, whose early death was
attributed partly to his disappointment that the popular
germ-theory of disease, in all its crudity, should have
seized public attention instead of the great microzymian
doctrine of the building up of all organised matter from
the microzymas, or "molecular granulations" of cells.
His incessant work, which kept him much apart from
his family, was the only hindrance to Bechamp's enjoy-
ment of a happy domestic life. An excellent husband and
father, he was always thoughtful for others, and in all his
dealings was as kind as he was firm. His lectures were
1
La Thiorie du Microzyma, par A. Bichamp, p. 123.