Pasteur and rabies: an interview of 1882.

The following interview was conducted in 1882, when Pasteur was sixty. In his long career, besides his discoveries in chemistry and crystallography, he had been successful in preventing the spoiling of wine and beer, in treating the diseases of silkworms, and in vaccination for fatal diseases among livestock, achievements of great importance to the economy of France. He had been received into the Acad6mie Fran,aise on 27 April 1882. He was at work on what would be the crowning achievement of his life, a cure for rabies. He attained it within three years. The first successful treatment of the disease among humans was in 1885. At the time of the interview he had not yet developed a cure for the disease among dogs-the inoculation of attenuated viruses. In 1882 Pasteur's understanding of bacteria, compared with ours, seems tentative and rudimentary. He knew less of the structure and function of the cell than the high school student knows today. But limitation of understanding does not preclude successful prophylaxis and treatment. Indeed, our understanding of the body and its pathology is not absolute, and yet we can cure diseases. Where the word "virus" appears in the following translation it represents the same word in the original, though of course Pasteur did not understand by the word what we understand. It might have been translated "poison" or "toxic agent", but I thought it better to preserve it as Pasteur used it. The interview was conducted by Clement Bertie-Marriott, a French journalist who used the pseudonym d'Alberty. Born in England in 1848, probably in Thundersley in Essex, he was a correspondent for British and American journals as well as a leading journalist in Paris. D'Alberty was not an Aristotle, but he was not a fool. And yet in the present interview he seems more impressed by Pasteur's reputation and the bizarrerie of his laboratory than by the significance of his work, though d'Alberty may have been writing for the tastes of his readers. A good interviewer, d'Alberty was more at home with theatre people, among whom reputation and achievement are more nearly allied, and interviews with them make up a large part of the collection in which is included the interview with Pasteur, Parisiens et parisiennes: mes entretiens.I The loan-word "interview" is used by