The Dream & Lie of Louis Pasteur by R. B. Pearson
The Dream & Lie of Louis Pasteur
by R. B. Pearson (originally Pasteur, Plagiarist,
Imposter 1942)
It is a rather serious matter to attack the reputation of a famous man, one who has
posed and been accepted as one of the world's greatest scientists. For many years, Pasteur
has been looked upon as a founder an but it is always pertinent to
look into the beginnings of any subject on which there is a difference of opinion, with
the hope of finding the truth in the matter.
The writer has made an effort in his prior books and pamphlets to show that the germ
theory is false, and that illness was practically always due to errors of diet or manner
of living, the germs being present solely as scavengers of dead and waste tissues and
foods, and not as the cause of the disease.
However, the erroneous belief that germs cause disease and must be controlled or
eliminated before it can be cured is so widespread as to close the minds of many people to
any other ideas on this subject.
For this reason it seems that a thorough investigation of this idea, the grounds on
which it is based, and even the bona-fides of those who started it on its way, is
necessary before any sane ideas as to the proper treatment of disease can be widely
promulgated.
When Miss Ethel Douglas Hume brought out Bechamp or Pasteur? in 1923, it appeared to be
just the thing that would fill this gap and end the use of serums and other biologicals
forever. But it is now 19 years since that book, which should have marked an epoch in the
healing arts, appeared. It did not receive the attention it deserved in medical circles
and, though it is now in its second edition,* the medical profession are pushing
biologicals harder than ever.
Hence it seems appropriate to go over the subject in order to show the truth regarding
the falsity of Pasteur's ideas and claims to fame, and the fraudulent basis on which the
germ theory rests, as was so well shown by Miss Hume in B<<champ or Pasteur?, and to add
other facts and statistics that support the idea that the germ theory is false, in the
hopes that it may receive wider circulation and more general attention, and possibly lead
to a complete overhauling of the question of the treatment of disease, especially
regarding serology.
The translations from the French, and other material in chapters 2, 3, 4 and 5 not
otherwise credited, are from Beauchamp or Pasteur? by Ethel Douglas Hume.
In closing, I wish to acknowledge my indebtedness to the Reverend and Mrs Wilber
Atchison of Chicago for many suggestions and valuable assistance in the preparation of the
manuscript. Miss L. Loat, secretary of the National Anti-Vaccination League of London, has
also been very kind, responding to every request for information with more than could be
used, some of it being especially compiled at the cost of considerable effort.
R. B. Pearson
January 15th, 1942
If you back into the history of the medical profession and the various ideas regarding
the cause of disease that were held by leading physicians before Pasteur first promulgated
his notorious &germ theory&, you will find convincing evidence that Pasteur
discovered nothing, and that he deliberately appropriated, falsified and perverted another
man's work.
The 'germ theory', so-called, long antedated Pasteur - so long, in fact, that he was
and he got away with it!
F. Harrison, Principal Professor of Bacteriology at Macdonald College (Faculty of
Agriculture, McGill University), Quebec, Canada, wrote an Historical Review of
Microbiology, published in Microbiology, a text book, in which he says in part:
&Geronimo Fracastorio (an Italian poet and physician, 1483 - 1553) of Verona,
published a work (De Contagionibus et Contagiosis Morbis, et eorum Curatione) in Venice in
1546 which contained the first statement of the true nature of contagion, infection, or
disease organisms, and of the modes of transmission of infectious disease. He divided
diseases into those which infect by immediate contact, through intermediate agents, and at
a distance through the air. Organisms which cause disease, called seminaria contagionum,
he supposed to be of the nature of viscous or glutinous matter, similar to the colloidal
states of substances described by modern physical chemists. These particles, too small to
be seen, were capable of reproduction in appropriate media, and became pathogenic through
the action of animal heat. Thus Fracastorio, in the middle of the sixteenth century, gave
us an outline of morbid processes in terms of microbiology.&
For a book published more than three hundred years before Pasteur 'discovered' the germ
theory, this seems to be a most astonishing anticipation of Pasteur's ideas, except that -
not having a microscope - Fracastorio apparently did not realize that these substances
might be individual living organisms.
According to Harrison, the first compound microscope was made by H. Jansen in 1590 in
Holland, but it was not until about 1683 that anything was built of sufficient power to
show up bacteria. He continues:
&In the year 1683, Antonius van Leenwenhoek, a Dutch naturalist and a maker of
lenses, communicated to the English Royal Society the results of observations which he had
made with a simple microscope of his own construction, magnifying from 100 to 150 times.
He found in water saliva, dental tartar, etc., what he termed animalcula. He described
what he saw, and in his drawings showed both rod-like and spiral form, both of which he
said had motility. In all probability, the two species he saw were those now recognized as
bacillus buccalis maximus and spirillum sputigenum.
Leenwenhoek's observations were purely objective and in striking contrast with the
speculative views of M. A. Plenciz, a Viennese physician, who in 1762 published a germ
theory of infectious diseases. Plenciz maintained that there was a special organism by
which each infectious disease was produced, that micro-organisms were capable of
reproduction outside of the body, and that they might be conveyed from place to place by
Here is Pasteur's great thought in toto - his complete germ theory - and put in print
over a century before Pasteur thought of it(?), or published it as his own!
Note how concisely it anticipates all Pasteur's ideas on germs. While there seems to be
no proof that Plenciz had a microscope, or knew of Leenwenhoek's animalcula, both are
possible, and likely, as he and he, rather than Pasteur, should have
any credit that might come from such a discovery - if the germ theory has any value. This
idea, which, to the people of that time at least, must have accounted easily and
completely for such strange occurrences as contagion, infection and epidemics, would have
been widely discussed in the medical or scientific circles of that time, and in literature
available to Pasteur.
That it was widely known is indicated by the fact that the world-famous English nurse,
Florence Nightingale, published an attack on the idea in 1860, over 17 years before
Pasteur adopted it and claimed it as his own.
She said of 'infection':
Diseases are not individuals arranged in classes, like cats and dogs, but conditions
growing out of one another.
Is it not living in a continual mistake to look upon diseases as we do now, as separate
entities, which must exist, like cats and dogs, instead of looking upon them as
conditions, like a dirty and a clean condition, and just as mu or
rather as the reactions of kindly nature, against the conditions in which we have placed
ourselves?
I was brought up to believe that smallpox, for instance, was a thing of which there was
once a first specimen in the world, which went on propagating itself, in a perpetual chain
of descent, just as there was a first dog, (or a first pair of dogs) and that smallpox
would not begin itself, any more than a new dog would begin without there having been a
parent dog.
Since then I have seen with my own eyes and smelled with my own nose smallpox growing
up in first specimens, either in closed rooms or in overcrowded wards, where it could not
by any possibility have been 'caught', but must have begun.
I have seen diseases begin, grow up, and pass into one another. Now, dogs do not pass
into cats.
I have seen, for instance, with a little overcrowding, con and
with a little more, and with a little more, typhus, and all in the same
ward or hut.
Would it not be far better, truer, and more practical, if we looked upon disease in
this light (for diseases, as all experience shows, are adjectives, not noun-substantives):
- True nursing ignores infection, except to prevent it. Cleanliness and fresh air from
open windows, with unremitting attention to the patient, are the only defence a true nurse
either asks or needs.
- Wise and humane management of the patient is the best safeguard against infection.
The greater part of nursing consists of preserving cleanliness.
- The specific disease doctrine is the grand refuge of weak, uncultured, unstable
minds, such as now rule in the medical profession. There are
are specific disease conditions.&
Here you have Florence Nightingale, one of the most famous nurses in history, after
life-long experience with infection, contagion and epidemics, challenging the germ theory
17 years before Pasteur put it forward as his own discovery! (See Ch.8, p.61).
She clearly understood it and its utter fallacy better before 1860 than Pasteur did,
either in 1878 or later!
And, to see what a parasite Pasteur was on men who did things, let us digress and go
back a few years, to the time when the study of germs was an outgrowth of the study of
fermentation.
About 1854, Professor Pierre Jacques Antoine Bechamp, one of France's greatest
scientists, then Professor at the School of Pharmacy in the Faculty of Science at
Strasbourg, later (1857-75) Professor of Medical Chemistry and Pharmacy at the University
of Montpelier, a member of many scientific societies, and a Chevalier of the Legion of
Honor, took up the study of fermentation.
He had succeeded in 1852 in so reducing the cost of producing aniline as to make it a
commercial success, and his formula became the basis of the German dye industry. This
brought him some fame, and many more problems to solve.
Up to this time, the idea prevailed that cane sugar, when dissolved in water, was
spontaneously transformed at an ordinary temperature into invert sugar, which is a mixture
of equal parts of glucose and fructose, but an experiment with starch had caused him to
doubt the truth of this idea.
Therefore in May, 1854, Bechamp undertook a series of observations on this change,
which came to be referred to as his &Beacon Experiment&. In this experiment, he
dissolved perfectly pure cane sugar in water in a glass bottle containing air, but tightly
stoppered. Several other bottles contained the same solution, but with a chemical added.
In the solution without any added chemical, moulds appeared in about thirty days, and
inversion of the sugar in this bottle then went on rapidly, but moulds and inversion did
not occur in the other bottles containing added chemicals. He measured the inversion
frequently with a polariscope.
These observations were concluded on February 3, 1855, and his paper was published in
the Report of the French Academy of Science for the session of February 19, 1855.
This left the moulds without an explanation, so he started a second series of
observations on June 25, 1856 (at Strasbourg) in order to determine if possible, their
origin, and on March 27, 1857, he started a third series of flasks to study the effects of
creosote on the changes. Both series were ended at Montpelier on December 5, 1857.
In the second series he spilled a little liquid from flasks 1 and 2 during
manipulation, so these two flasks contained a little air in contact with the liquid. In
these two flasks, moulds soon appeared, and alteration in the medium ensued.
He also found that the changes were more rapid in the flask in which the mould grew
more rapidly.
In the other nine flasks there was no air, no mould formed, and no inversion of the
plainly air was needed for the moulds and inversion to occur. This proved
beyond any possibility of doubt that the moulds and inversion of the sugar could not be
&spontaneous& action, but must be due to something carried in the air admitted
to the first two flasks.
Yet Pasteur later called fermentation &life without air, or life without
At this time, it was quite generally believed that fermentation could not take place
except in the presence of albuminoids, which were in general use by Pasteur and others as
part of their solutions . Hence, their solutions could have contained these living
organizations to start with.
Bechamp's solutions contained only pure cane sugar and water, and when heated with
fresh-slaked lime did not disengage ammonia - ample proof that they contained no albumen.
Yet moulds, obviously living organisms, and therefore containing albuminoid matter, had
appeared in these two solutions.
Bechamp proved to his own satisfaction that these moulds were living organisms and that
cane sugar was inverted, as he said &... only in proportion to the development of
moulds. These elementary vegetations then acting as ferments.&
Pasteur, apparently overlooking the air contact, challenged Bechamp's statements,
&... to be logical, Bechamp should say that he has proved that moulds arise in
pure sugared water, without nitrogen, phosphates or other mineral elements, for that is an
enormity that can be deduced from his work, in which there is not the expression of the
least astonishment that moulds have been able to grow in pure water with pure sugar
without any other mineral or organic principles.&
Bechamp's retort to this was:
&A chemist au courant with science ought not to be surprised that moulds are
developed in sweetened water, contained in contact with air in glass flasks. It is the
astonishment of Pasteur that is astonishing&
As Bechamp started with no nitrogen whatever except what was in the air in the first
two flasks, it is probably the first time any growth or any kind of organism was proved to
have absorbed nitrogen from the air. Apparently Pasteur could not grasp this idea!
In the preface to his last book, The Third Element of the Blood, Bechamp says that
these facts impressed him in the same way that the swing of the cathedral lamp had
impressed Galileo. He realized that some living organisms had been carried into these two
flasks in the small amount of air admitted, and acting as ferments had produced the mould
and the inversion in the sugar. He compared the transformation of cane sugar in the
presence of moulds to that produced upon starch by diastase, the ferment that converts
starch into sugar.
He sent in his report on these findings to the Academy of Science in December 1857, and
an extract was published in its reports of January 4, 1858,5 though the full paper was not
published until September that year.
He says of these experiments:
&By its title the memoir was a work of pure chemistry, which had at first no other
object than to determine whether or not pure cold water could invert cane sugar and if,
further, the salts had any influence on the inversion. But soon the question, as I had
foreseen, it became at once physiological and dependent upon the
phenomena of fermentation and the question of spontaneous generation. Thus from the study
of a simple chemical fact, I was led to investigate the causes of fermentation, and the
nature and origin of ferments.&
Although Schwann had suggested airborne germs in about 1837, he had not proved his
here Bechamp proved them to exist.
Yet Pasteur in his 1857 memoirs still clings to the idea that both the moulds and
ferments &take birth spontaneously&, although his solutions all contained dead
yeast or yeast broth which might have carried germs or ferments from the start.
He does conclude that the ferment is a living being, yet states that this &cannot
be irrefutably demonstrated&.
But Bechamp had demonstrated it &irrefutably& in his paper, and also had
proved that water alone caused no alteration, there was no spontaneous alteration, and
that moulds do not develop, nor inversion occur, without
airborne organism must cause the moulds and the inversion.
According to Miss Hume, Bechamp was also the first to distinguish between the
&organized& or living ferment and the soluble ferment which he obtained by
crushing the moulds, and which he found to act directly on the sugar, causing rapid
inversion.
He named this substance zymase, in a paper Memoirs on Fermentation by Organized
Ferments, which he read before the Academy of Science on April 4, 1864.
Strange to say, exactly the same word is used by others whom various encyclopaedias
have credited with this discovery in 1897, over 30 years later!
In this paper he also gave his final complete explanation of the phenomena of
fermentation, as being due to the nutrition i.e. a process of
absorption, assimilation, and excretion.
In the preface to his last work (The Third Element of the Blood), Bechamp says (p.16):
&It resulted that the soluble ferment was allied to the insoluble by the relation
of the soluble ferment being unable to exist without the organized
ferment, which is necessarily insoluble.
Further, as the soluble ferment and the albuminoid matter, being nitrogenous, could
only be formed by obtaining the nitrogen from the limited volume of air left in the
flasks, it was at the same time demonstrated that the free nitrogen of the air could help
directly in the synthesis of the nitrogenous which up to that time
had been a disputed question.
Thus it became evident that since the material forming the structure of moulds and
yeast was elaborated within the organism, it must also be true that the soluble ferments
and products of fermentation are also secreted there, as was the case with the soluble
ferment that inverted the cane sugar. Hence I became assured that that which is called
fermentation is in reality the phenomena of nutrition, assimilation and disassimilation,
and the excretion of the products disassimilated.&
He explained further:
&In these solutions there existed no
they were made with
pure cane sugar, which heated with fresh-slaked lime, does not give off ammonia. It thus
appears evident that airborne germs found the sugared solution a favourable medium for
their development, and it must be admitted that the ferment is here produced by the
generation of fungi.
The matter that develops in the sugared water sometimes presents itself in the form of
little isolated bodies, and sometimes in the form of voluminous colourless membranes which
come out in one mass from the flasks. These membranes, heated with caustic potash, give
off ammonia in abundance.&
This proved that albuminoids were present, hence the little bodies were living matter.
It also proves that Professor Bechamp understood the formation and growth of moulds and
ferments in 1857, years before Pasteur comprehended these physiological processes!
In 1859, over a year after Bechamp's paper covering his 1857 experiments was printed,
Pasteur started another experiment more in line with Bechamp's ideas, in fact apparently
inspired by them.
He omitted all yeast but used ammonia, which contains nitrogen, in his solutions, and
then ascribed the origin of lactic yeast to the atmospheric air. He was surprised that
animal and vegetable matter should appear and grow in such an environment. He says:
&As to the origin of the lactic yeast in these experiments, it is solely due to
we fall back here upon facts of spontaneous generation.&
After asserting that excluding atmospheric air or boiling the solution will prevent the
formation of organisms, or fermentations, he says:
&On this point, the question of spontaneous generation has made progress.&
In a still later memoir plainly inspired by Bechamp's Beacon Experiment, Pasteur again
constantly refers to the spontaneous production of yeasts and fermentation.
There is no question but that he still believed in spontaneous generation of germs and
ferments at this time, and his reasoning appears somewhat childish when compared to
Bechamp's work.
However, in 1860, he started another experiment in which he prepared 73 phials of
unfermented liquid to expose at various points on a much advertised-in-advance trip. He
opened and resealed various phials at different places, the last twenty on the Mer de
Glace above Chamonix.
He practically repeated Bechamp's experiments here, but of course he had to use a
different and more spectacular method to get attention.
From this time he veered away from spontaneous generation, and began to explain the
same occurrences (fermentation) as being caused by germs in the air.
Paul de Kruif in Microbe Hunters (a grandiose attempt to exalt some of the original
experimenters in serumology), glosses over Pasteur's willingness to steal credit for the
ideas of others, and after describing his use, without credit, of Ballard's suggestion of
the swan neck bottle to admit dust-free and germ-free air into a flask, says of this
&high Alps& experiment:
&Then Pasteur invented an experiment that was - so far as one can tell from a
careful search through the records - really his own. It was a grand experiment, a
semi-public experiment, an experiment that meant rushing across France in trains, it was a
test in which he had to slither on glaciers.& (p.83)
However, de Kruif doubted thoroughly that it was Pasteur's, and well he might! Yet
little did he realize how few of Pasteur's foolhardy claims were either his own or, in
fact, even true in any particular.
In a discussion of spontaneous generation at the Sorbonne during a meeting on November
22, 1861, Pasteur had the nerve to claim, in the presence of Professor Bechamp, all credit
for the proof that living organisms appeared in a medium devoid of albuminoid matter!
Bechamp asked him to admit knowledge of Bechamp's 1857 work, but did not charge him with
plagiarism, and Pasteur evaded the question, merely admitting that Bechamp's work was
&rigidly exact&. This was not an accident, but deliberat
however, Bechamp was too much of a gentleman to make any unpleasant charges.
That it took several more years to get the spontaneous generation idea entirely out of
Pasteur's head is indicated by the article on Pasteur in the 14th Edition of the
Encyclopaedia Britannica, which says:
&The recognition of the fact that both lactic and alcohol fermentation were
hastened by exposure to air naturally led Pasteur to wonder whether his invisible
organisms were always present in the atmosphere or whether they were spontaneously
generated. By a series of intricate experiments, including the filtration of air and the
famous exposure of unfermented liquids to the pure air of the high Alps, he was able to
declare with certainty in 1864 that the minute organisms causing fermentation were not
spontaneously generated but came from similar organisms with which ordinary air was
impregnated.&
Here it is again - not until 1864 did he give up his idea of spontaneous generation -
and the high Alps stuff was only high theatre, well advertised in advance, to enable him
to grab Bechamp's discovery, and yet have some 'new stuff' to attract attention to
himself. Of course, he could not follow exac some one might bring up
Bechamp's memoirs, hence the &high Alps& and &slithering on glaciers&.
His experiments made in 1859 also indicated knowledge of Bechamp's work without
albuminoids, and his evasion of Bechamp's question at the Sorbonne meeting in 1861 lends
further support to such a belief, while his attacks on Bechamp would indicate that he
recognized a rival and was keenly jealous.
Note that this final acceptance of ideas that Bechamp had brought forward six years
earlier did not come until after Bechamp had published his complete paper, with a full and
most thoroughly proven explanation of the processes of fermentation.
However, Pasteur had, on completion of his &high Alps& experiment in 1860,
accepted, or began to accept, the idea that germs of the air and soon
he leaped way ahead to the conclusion that these germs also caused disease, as Plenciz had
suggested about a hundred years before!
Of this idea, he had no more proof than Plenciz, except that it was now known there
were germs in existence, which Plenciz, apparently, did not prove.
Although Bechamp had made clear the physiological nature of fermentation in his paper
on his 1857 experiments (published in 1858), and had given more complete details in his
1864 paper, Pasteur apparently had not fully grasped its true nature as late as 1872, when
he published a paper in which he stated:
&That which separates the chemical phenomenon of fermentation from a crowd of
other acts and especially from the acts of ordinary life is the fact of the decomposition
of a weight of fermentative matter much superior to the weight of the ferment.&
Could anyone make such a statement who really understood the true nature of
fermentative action? Apparently Pasteur did not!
In collaboration with A. Estor, Bechamp answered this with an effort to make the nature
of fermentation clear, in a paper printed on page 1523 of the same volume, in which he
&Suppose an adult man to have lived a century, and to weigh on average 60
kilograms. He will have consumed in that time, besides other foods, the equivalent of
20,000 kilograms of flesh, and produced about 800 kilograms of urea. Of course there is no
suggestion that this mass of flesh and urea could at any moment of his life form part of
his being.
Just as a man consumes all that food only by repeating the same act a great many times,
the yeast cell consumes the great mass of sugar only by constantly assimilating and
disassimilating it, bit by bit. Now, that which only one man will consume in a century, a
sufficient number of men would absorb in a day.
It is the the sugar that a small number of cells would only
consume in a year, a greater number would destroy in a day. In both cases, the more
numerous the individuals, the more rapid the consumption.&
Is that not clear enough, even for a man whose diploma was marked &mediocre in
Chemistry& (Pasteur) to comprehend? It seems that a child should be able to
understand it.
Yet Pasteur repeated his statement four years later in Etudes sur la Bier (1876), so
Bechamp's clear explanation apparently failed to have any effect - at least on him.
Here is proof that from eight to fourteen years after Bechamp had completely disclosed
the physiological nature of fermentation and described its action minutely, Pasteur had
not yet grasped the facts regarding the process!
In its article on fermentation, the Encyclopaedia Britannica says:
&Fermentation, according to Pasteur, was caused by the growth and multiplication
of unicellular organisms out of contact with free oxygen, under which circumstances they
acquire the power of taking oxygen from chemical compounds in the medium in which they are
growing. In other words, 'fermentation is life without air, or life without oxygen'. This
theory of fermentation was materially modified in 1892 and 1894 by A. J. Brown, who
described experiments which were in disagreement with Pasteur's dictum.&
So did Bechamp over 35 years earlier - in 1855 and 1858 - and Pasteur appropriated and
perverted his ideas.
Pasteur also jumped to the conclusion that each kind of fermentation had one specific
germ, while Bechamp proved that each micro-organism might vary its fermentative effect in
conformity with the medium in which it finds itself. He also showed that these
micro-organisms, under varying conditions, might even change their shape, as has been
recently proved so conclusively by F. Loehnis and N. R. Smith of the U.S. Dept. of
Agriculture and others.
Pasteur, however, proceeded to classify his germs and label each with a definite and
unalterable function, wherein he was wrong again, as we shall see later.
Another step that went along with the work on fermentation in general was the discovery
of the causes of diseases in French grapes.
Bechamp, hearing of the commotion over this trouble in the vineyards, quietly took up a
study of it in 1862, the year before Pasteur turned his attention to the subject.
Bechamp exposed to contact with air:
grape-must as found on the vines,
grape-must filtered, and
grape-must decolorized by animal charcoal.
They all fermented, but not equally so, and the moulds or ferments developed were not
identical in these three experiments, which of course caused him to seek a reason for
On further experiments, with the rigid exclusion of all air (the whole healthy grapes,
with stalks attached, being introduced directly from the vine into boiled sweetened water,
cooled with carbonic acid gas bubbling through it), fermentation took place, and was
completed in this medium, proving that air was not required. Hence the ferment must have
been carried on the grapes, and was not airborne.
Professor Bechamp concluded that the organism causing the must to ferment must be
carried on the grape, its leaves, or the vines, and that it might also be an organism
injurious to the plants.
He published a volume on vinous fermentation in 1863, entitled Lecons sur la
Fermentation Vineuse et sur la Fabrication du Vin, in which he gave an intelligent
discussion of the subject.
He also presented two papers on the making of wine to the Academy, entitled Sur les
Acids du Vin and Sur l'utilite et les Inconvienient du Cuvages Prolonges dans la
Fabrication du Vin - Sur la Fermentation Alcoolique dans cette Fabrication.
In October 1864 he presented a communication to the Academy of Science on The Origin of
Vinous Fermentation, an exhaustive account of the experiments described above.
This paper was a complete study of the subject, in which he proved that vinous
fermentation was due to organisms found on the skins of grapes and also often found on the
leaves and other parts of the vine. Hence at times, diseased vines might affect the
quality of the fermentation and the resulting wine.
Thus by October 1864, Bechamp had several authoritative papers in print, but where was
his super-learned rival?
In 1862 Pasteur was admitted to the French Academy through the influence of Biot and
the Mineralogical Section, which based its nomination and support on Pasteur's past work
yet many attacks were made on his treatment of that subject, and he
took the advice of friends to drop this line of work!
In March 1863, he met the Emperor and was soon sent to the vineyards to study the grape
disease, with the prestige of having the Emperor's backing.
He published several papers on the vines and their troubles in the latter part of 1863
and in 1864, but apparently was still riding his spontaneous generation theory which
Bechamp had so completely exploded in 1858, and he did not guess correctly as to the cause
of the trouble with the vines.
In 1865 he offered five papers, and others came later, but he does not seem to have hit
on the right answer to the problem until 1872, when he made the great discovery that
Bechamp was right again! In this year, Pasteur presented a memoir entitled New Experiments
to Demonstrate that the Yeast Germ that Makes Wine comes from the Exterior of Grapes.
As Bechamp had made the same statement in his 1864 paper and it had not been disproven
in the intervening eight years, it was a pretty safe bet for Pasteur to make!
As shown in the second chapter, Bechamp was the first to prove that the moulds
accompanying fermentation were, or contained, living organisms, and could not be
spontaneously generated but must be an outgrowth of some living organism carried in the
This much was in his 1858 memoir, six years before Pasteur came to the same
conclusions.
Being first to realize that these moulds or ferments were living organisms, he
naturally was also the first to attempt to determine their true nature and functions, and
their origins.
On putting some under the microscope, he noted a diversity in appearance of the moulds
and was soon involved in a study of cell life.
In his earlier experiments, Bechamp had used several salts, including potassium
carbonate, in the presence of which the inversion of cane sugar did not take place. But
when he repeated this experiment using calcium carbonate (common chalk) instead of the
potassium carbonate, he found that inversion of the cane sugar did take place, even when
creosote was added. This observation was so unexpected that he omitted it from his earlier
memoir in order to verify it before publication of the fact.
In carefully controlled experiments he found that when chemically pure calcium
carbonate, CaCO3, was added to his sugar solutions, no inversion took place, but when
ordinary chalk, even that chipped from the native rock without access of air, was used,
inversion always occurred.
On heating the common chalk to 300 degrees, he found that it lost its powers of
fermentation, and on examining more of the unheated common chalk under the microscope, he
found it contained some &little bodies& similar to those found in prior
observations, and which he found did not exist in the chemically pure CaCO3, nor in the
chalk that had been heated.
These &little bodies& had the power of movement and were smaller than any of
the microphytes seen in fermentation or moulds, but were more powerful ferments than any
he had encountered previously.
Their power of movement and production of fermentation caused him to regard them as
living organisms.
He advised Dumas of his discovery of living organisms in chalk in December 1864, and
later, on September 26, 1865, he wrote a letter which Dumas had published. He stated:
&Chalk and milk contain already developed living beings, which is proved by the
fact that creosote, employed in a non-coagulating dose, does not prevent milk from finally
turning, nor chalk, without extraneous help, from converting both sugar and starch into
alcohol and then into acetic acid, tartaric acid, and butyric acid,&
Which of course was ample proof that there was a ferment, a living organism, present in
both milk and chalk.
He said of these:
&The naturalist will not be able to distinguish t but the
chemist and also the physiologist will characterize them by their function.
Professor Bechamp found that the chalk seemed to be formed mostly of the mineral or
fossil remains of a &microscopic world& and contained organisms of infinitesimal
size, which he believed to be alive.
He also believed they might be of immense antiquity, as he had traced the block of
limestone he had used to the Tertiary P yet he found that stone cut from
the solid ledge, with all air excluded, had &wonderful& fermentative powers,
which he traced to the same &little bodies& as he had found to cause
fermentation in his earlier experiments. He concluded that they must have lived embedded
in the stone of the ledge for many thousands of years.
In 1866 he sent to the Academy of Science a memoir called On the role of chalk in
butyric and lactic fermentations, and the living organism contained in it.
In this paper, he named his &little bodies& microzymas, from the Greek words
meaning small ferment.
He also studied the relations of his microzymas of chalk to the molecular granulations
of animal and vegetable cells, with many more geological examinations, and wrote a paper
entitled On Geological Microzymas of Various Origins, which was abstracted in Comptes
Rendus of the session of April 25, 1870.
He proved that the molecular granulation found in yeast and other animal and vegetable
cells had individuality and life and also had the power to cause fermentation, and so he
called them microzymas also.
He called his geological microzymas &morphologically identical& with the
microzymas of living beings.
In innumerable laboratory experiments, assisted now by Professor A. Estor, another very
able scientist, he found microzymas everywhere, in all organic matter, in both healthy
tissues and in diseased, where he also found them associated with various kinds of
After painstaking study they decided that the microzymas rather than the cell were the
elementary units of life, and were in fact the builders of cell tissues. They also
concluded that bacteria are an outgrowth or an evolutionary form of microzymas that occur
when a quantity of diseased tissues must be broken up into its constituent elements.
In other words, all living organisms, he believed, from the one celled amoeba to
mankind, were associations of these minute living entities, and their presence was
necessary for cell life to grow and for cells to be repaired.
Bacteria, they proved, can develop from microzyma by passing through certain
intermediate stages, which they described, and which have been regarded by other
researchers as different species!
The germs of the air, they decided, were merely microzymas, or bacteria set free when
their former habitat was broken up, and they concluded that the &little bodies&
in the limestone and chalk were the survivors of living beings of long past ages.
This brought them to the beginning of 1868, and to test these ideas they obtained the
body of a kitten25 which they buried in pure carbonate of lime, specially prepared and
creosoted to exclude any airborne or outside germs.
They placed it in a glass jar and covered the open top with several sheets of paper,
placed so as to allow renewal of the air without allowing dust or organisms to enter. This
was left on a shelf in Bechamp's laboratory until the end of 1874.
When opened, it was found that the kitten's body had been entirely consumed except for
some small fragments of bone and dry matter. There was no smell, and the carbonate of lime
was not discoloured.
Under the microscope, microzymas were not seen in the upper part of the carbonate of
lime, but &swarmed by thousands& in the part that had been below the kitten's
As Bechamp thought that there might have been airborne germs in the kitten's fur, lungs
or intestines, he repeated this experiment, using the whole carcass of a kitten in one
case, the liver only in another, and the heart, lungs and kidneys in a third test. These
viscera were plunged into carbolic acid the moment they had been detached from the
slaughtered animal. This experiment began in June 1875 and continued to August 1882 - over
seven years.
It completely satisfied him that his idea that microzymas were the living remains of
plant and animal life of which, in either a recent or distant past, they had been the
constructive cellular elements, and that they were in fact the primary anatomical elements
of all living beings, was correct.
He proved that on the death of an organ its cells disappear, but the microzymas remain,
imperishable!
As the geologists estimated that the chalk rocks or ledges from which he took his
&geological microzymas& were 11 million years old, it was proof positive that
these microzymas could live in a dormant state for practically unlimited lengths of time.
When he again found bacteria in the remains of the second experiment, as he had in the
first, he concluded that he had proved, because of the care taken to exclude airborne
organisms, that bacteria can and do develop from microzymas, and are in fact a scavenging
form of the microzymas, developed when death, decay, or disease cause an extraordinary
amount of cell life either to need repair or be broken up.
He wrote in 1869:
In typhoid fever, gangrene and anthrax, the existence has been found of bacteria in the
tissues and blood, and one was very much disposed to take them for granted as cases of
ordinary parasitism. It is evident, after what we have said, that instead of maintaining
that the affection has had as its origin and cause the introduction into the organism of
foreign germs with their consequent action, one should affirm that one only has to deal
with an alteration of the function of microzymas, an alteration indicated by the change
that has taken place in their form.&
This view coincides well with the modern view of all germs found in nature, except
those in the body, which are still looked on as causing the conditions they are found
with, rather than being the result of these conditions, which is their true relation to
The Encyclopedia Britannica says in the entry on bacteriology:
&The common idea of bacteria in the minds of most people is that of a hidden and
sinister scourge lying in wait for mankind. This popular conception is born of the fact
that attention was first focused upon bacteria through the discovery, some 70 years ago,
of the relationship of bacteria to disease in man, and that in its infancy the study of
bacteriology was a branch of medical science. Relatively few people assign to bacteria the
important position in the world of living things that they rightly occupy, for it is only
a few of the bacteria known today that have developed in such a way that they can live in
the human body, and for every one of this kind, there are scores of others which are
perfectly harmless and far from being regarded as the enemies of mankind, must be numbered
among his best friends.
It is in fact no exaggeration to say that upon the activities of bacteria the very
exis indeed, without bacteria there could be no other living thing in
for every animal and plant owes its existence to the fertility of the soil and
this in turn depends upon the activity of the micro-organisms which inhabit the soil in
almost inconceivable numbers. It is one of the main objects of this article to show how
tr there will be found in it only passing reference to the organisms
which produces diseas for information on these see Pathology and
Immunity.&
The writer of the above thoroughly understands germs or bacteria with only one
the bacteria found in man and animals do not cause disease. They have the same
function as those found in the soil, or in sewage, or they are there
to rebuild dead or diseased tissues, or rework body wastes, and it is well known that they
will not or cannot attack healthy tissues. They are as important and necessary to human
life as those found elsewhere in nature, and are in reality just as harmless if we live
correctly, as Bechamp so clearly showed.
Between 1855 and 1865 a widespread epidemic among silk worms called pebrine alarmed the
south of France, so much so that finally, in 1865, it drew national attention.
Professor Bechamp, early in 1865, took up the study of this epidemic entirely at his
own expense, and without the aid of others, and quickly found it was caused by a small
His long experience with small micro-organisms, and the way creosote had inhibited
their growth in his Beacon Experiment of 1854 and 1855, at once suggested the way out.
Hence he was able to state before the Agricultural Society of Herault the same year
that pebrine was a parasitic disease and that thin creosote vapour would prevent the
attack of the parasite.
However, in the meantime, the Government had taken an interest in the subject, and in
June 1865 sent Pasteur down to investigate the disease.
Pasteur, with the prestige of being an official representative of the government, was
able to centre all attention on his own work, to the depreciation of the work of others,
though he admitted having never touched a silk worm before he started on this mission.
Nevertheless, the fact that something 'official' was being done caused agricultural
societies to await his verdict, instead of at once taking up Professor Bechamp's ideas.
Pasteur's first statement on his new subject was made in September 1865, when he
published a very erroneous description, claiming:
&The corpuscles are neither animal nor vegetable, but bodies more or less
analogous to cancerous cells or those of pulmonary tuberculosis. From the point of view of
a methodic classification, they should rather be ranged beside globules of pus, or
globules of blood, or better still, granules of starch, than beside infusoria or moulds
... It is the chrysalide rather than the worm, that one should try to submit to proper
remedies.&
This description shows that he had no conception of the real nature of the problem.
Bechamp's comment was:
&Thus this chemist, who is occupying himself with fermentation, has not begun to
decide whether or not he is dealing with a ferment.&
Pasteur, about this time, dropped his work because of the deaths of his father and two
of his daughters, and before going back, spent a week at the Palace of Compiegne as the
guest of Napoleon III.
In February 1866, he again took up the poor silk worms' troubles and had the assistance
this time of several able French scientists, yet they made very little progress on the
Meanwhile, Bechamp had made further studies on pebrine, and sent a paper entitled On
the Harmlessness of the Vapors of Creosote in the Rearing of Silk Worms to the Academy of
In this article he repeated the statements he had made before the Agricultural Society
at Herault and added that:
&The disease is parasitical. Pebrine attacks the worms at the start from the
outside and the germ of the parasite comes from the air. The disease, in a word, is not
primarily constitutional.&
He described developing the eggs or seeds of the silk worm in an enclosure permeated
with a slight odour of creosote, in which he produced eggs entirely free of pebrine, and
it took so little creosote that his methods were commercially practical.
However, Pasteur had not yet found the true cause of the trouble. He sent a paper
entitled New Studies on the Disease of Silk Worms to the Academy, in which he said:
&I am very much inclined to believe that there is no actual disease of silk worms.
I cannot better make clear my opinion of silk worm disease than by comparing it to the
effects of pulmonary phthisis. My observations of this year have fortified me in the
opinion that these little organisms are neither animalcules nor cryptogamic plants. It
appears to me that it is chiefly the cellular tissue of all the organs that is transformed
into corpuscles or produces them.&
But again he guessed wrong, and neither he nor all of his assistants could prove
statements that were false.
He also took a slap at Bechamp's paper by saying:
&One would be tempted to believe, especially from the resemblance of the
corpuscles to the spores of mucorina, that a parasite had invaded the nurseries. That
would be an error.&
And yet Bechamp had already proved beyond question that it was nothing else but a
parasite! Possibly, jealousy caused Pasteur to take a contrary view.
Pasteur, apparently, had not finally given up his &spontaneous generation&
ideas until 1862 or 1864, and since then, had ascribed all signs of fermentation, and all
disease, to airborne germs, yet here he denies that this disease is parasitic! And after
Bechamp's papers proved it!
Bechamp answered him in a paper entitled Researches of the Nature of the Actual Disease
of Silk Worms which contained more proofs of its parasitical nature.
He said that the vibrant corpuscle:
&... is not a pathological production, something analogous to a globule of pus or
a cancer cell, or to pulmonary tubercles, but is distinctly a cell of a vegetable
In another paper Bechamp described experiments that proved the corpuscle to be an
organized ferment that would invert sugar, and produce alcohol, acetic acid, etc.
This paper seemed to convince Pasteur that Bechamp was right, for in January 1867, in a
letter written to Durny, Minister of Public Instruction, he began to claim all credit for
Bechamp's ideas on the silk worm diseases.
Bechamp provided a still more complete account of his discovery which the Academy
printed on April 29, 1867, and the same issue contained a letter from Pasteur to Dumas,
dated April 24, in which he expressed regrets over his &mistakes& and promised a
paper with a complete story of the disease soon.
On May 13, 1867, Bechamp sent a letter to the President of the Academy of Science
pointing out Pasteur's errors and asking recognition of the priority of his own
discoveries regarding silk worm diseases. He also sent another paper entitled New Facts to
Help the History of the Actual Disease of Silk Worms and the Nature of the Vibrant
Corpuscles.
In this paper he described the corpuscles as airborne and to be found on mulberry
leaves, and he also described a second silk worm disease different from pebrine, which he
called flacherie, and on which he had published a pamphlet privately, on April 11, 1867.
In the meantime he had also submitted several papers on various microscopic organisms,
more or less broadening the general knowl one of which was a general
study of bacterial development from his microzymas.
In a paper entitled On the Microzymian Disease of Silk Worms Bechamp gave a full
description of this second disease called flacherie. This was published in the paper dated
June 8, 1868, and on June 24 Pasteur wrote to Dumas claiming to have been the first to
discover this second silk worm disease and demanding that a note he claimed to have sent
to the Agricultural Society of Alais on June 1 be printed (as the records then contained
no proof of Pasteur's claim to this).
Bechamp answered this claim in a note entitled On the Microzymian Disease of Silk
Worms, in Regard to a Recent Communication of M. Pasteur, which was published under the
date of July 13, 1867, in which he referred to his pamphlet of April 11, 1867, (revised
and reprinted March 28, 1868) and his papers of May 13 and June 10, 1867, all of which
were prior to any publication of Pasteur's!
However, Pasteur used his prestige as a Government representative to brow-beat others
into coming to his support, and he was finally widely recognized, and Bechamp's claims as
to the discoveries on silk worm diseases ignored. The majority of those who knew his
claims were false were afraid to oppose anyone who was so close to Napoleon, and who had
so much official standing as Pasteur then had.
In his book on the diseases of silk worms, Pasteur takes all the credit for these
discoveries, and shows how ignorant of the subject he still is by ridiculing Bechamp's
statements that creosote was a preventative - so he knew of them!
Miss Hume says that members of the Academy actually asked Professor Bechamp to drop his
use of the word microzyma, and even to drop his work!
In Microbe Hunters, Paul de Kruif gives a slightly different version of Pasteur's work
on silk worms from that outlined above. He states that Dumas, his old professor, appealed
to Pasteur to help the silk worm growers of southern France, and continues:
&Anything but a respecter of persons, Pasteur, who loved and respected himself
above all men, had always kept a touching reverence for Dumas. He must help his sad old
professor! But how? It is doubtful at this time that Pasteur could have told a silk worm
from an angle worm! Indeed, when he was first given a cocoon to examine, he held it up to
his ear, shook it and cried: 'Why there is something inside it!'& (p.91.)
De Kruif also ascribes the belated discovery that pebrine was a parasitical disease to
Gernez, one of his assistants, and says:
&Gernez hurried to Pasteur. 'It is solved,' he cried, 'the little globules are
alive - they are parasites! They are what makes the worms sick!'
It was six months before Pasteur was convinced that Gernez was right, but when at last
he understood, he swooped back to his work, and once more called the committee together.
'The little corpuscles are not only a sign of the disease, they are its cause. These
globules are alive, they multiply, they force themselves into every part of the moth's
body.'& (p.95.)
It is strange that with the dispute raging between Bechamp and Pasteur over who had
discovered that pebrine was a parasitical disease, Gernez did not speak of his own claims
in the matter - possibly a job was more important.
De Kruif continues:
&He was forty-five. He wallowed in this glory for a moment and then - having saved
the silk worm industry with the help of God and Gernez - he raised his eyes toward one of
those bright, impossible, but always partly true visions that it was his poet's gift to
see. He raised his artist's eyes from the sickness of silk worms to the sorrows of
'It is in the power of man to make parasitic maladies disappear from the face of the
globe, if the doctrine of spontaneous generation is wrong as I am sure it is!'&
His forty-fifth year must have been 1867, and Bechamp had proven spontaneous generation
wrong in 1855 or '56, as described earlier, at least 10 years beforehand.
Clearly de Kruif did the name of Bechamp, the greatest of all, and
the only 'microbe hunter' who really understood their true place in nature, does not
appear in his book Microbe Hunters at all!
In spite of all his errors in the work on silk worms, and because of his high position
and royal favouritism, Pasteur was put in charge of the practical measures of fighting
this parasite, and of course did not adopt Bechamp's method of using creosote vapour.
Dr A. Lateud, at one time editor of the Journal de Medecine de Paris, charged that
whereas in 1850 France had produced 30 million kilograms of cocoons, and its output had
sunk to 15 million kilograms in 1866-7 due to the epidemic, after Pasteur's methods of
'prevention' had been introduced, production shrank to 8 million kilograms in 1873 and as
low as 2 million kilograms in certain subsequent years. He continued:
&That is the way in which Pasteur saved sericulture! The reputation which he still
preserves in this respect among ignoramuses and short-sighted savants has been brought
into being:
- by himself, by means of i
- by the sellers of microscopic seeds on the Pasteur system, who have realized big
benefits at the expens
- by the complicity of the Academies and public bodies, which, without any
investigation, reply to the complaints of the cultivators: 'But sericulture is saved! Make
use of Pasteur's system!' However, everybody is not disposed to employ a system that
consists in enriching oneself by the ruination of others.&
Plainly his sins found him out here - at least with those who were in closest touch
with the silk worm cultivators!
It is astonishing, in view of such a failure - and after Bechamp had shown how to
prevent these diseases - that Pasteur's reputation did not go down in a public scandal!
Apparently royal favour and the academies and public bodies protected him from this.
While many of Pasteur's contemporaries must have known of his plagiarisms from
Bechamp's work, they were probably cowed into silence, or kept out of the press by
Pasteur's bully-ragging tactics, as well as by his prestige, not only in the public eye
and with royalty, but also with the &academies and public bodies& Dr Lateud
refers to.
Miss Hume goes on to show that his treatment for rabies and his anthrax serum were the
same colossal failure and fraud, as will be shown in Chapter Eight, and she discusses
other plagiarisms on Pasteur's part, but it hardly seems necessary to go into all of these
matters here. We have seen enough evidence of incompetence and fraud to forever doubt any
further statements that bear his signature, but there is one more piece of work that is
worth looking into.
Some years after the events we have described, Dr M. L. Leverson, M.D., Ph.D., M.A., an
American physician, discovered some of Professor Bechamp's writings in New York and
immediately realized that they anticipated Pasteur in certain important points. He went to
France, met Professor Bechamp, and heard the story of the plagiarism from him, since which
time he has done a great deal to bring Bechamp's work to public attention.
He was one of the first in the United States to recognize Bechamp's priority in regard
to most of the discoveries generally credited to Pasteur, and in a lecture entitled
Pasteur, the Plagiarist, delivered at Claridges Hotel, London, on May 25, 1911, outlined
briefly Bechamp's claim to priority, and added the charge that Pasteur had deliberately
faked an important paper!
He said in part:
&Pasteur's plagiarisms of the discoveries of Bechamp, and of Bechamp's
collaborators, run through the whole of Pasteur's life and work, except as to
crystallography, which may or may not have been his own. I have not investigated that part
of his career, nor do I feel any interest in it. The tracings of some of these
plagiarisms, though they can be clearly demonstrated, are yet somewhat intricate, too much
but there is one involving the claim by Pasteur to have discovered the
cause of one of the diseased conditions which assail the silk worm, which can be verified
by any one able to read the French language. It is the following:&
After describing some of the material we have covered in Chapter 5, he continues:
&But I have a still graver and more startling charge to bring against Pasteur as a
supposed man of science.
* Scientific Bluff
Finding how readily the 'men of science' of his day accepted his fairy tales, in a
voluminous memoir of no value (published in the Annales de Chimie et de Physique 3rd S.,
Vol. LVIII), is to be found on page 381 a section entitled Production of Yeast in a Medium
Formed of Sugar, of a Salt of Ammonia and of Phosphates.
The real, though not confessed, object of the paper was to cause it to be believed that
he, and not Bechamp, was the first to produce a ferment in a fermentative medium without
albuminoid matter. Now mark, I pray you, what I say - the alleged experiment described in
the memoir was a fake - purely and simply a fake. Yeast cannot be produced under the
conditions of that section! If those of my hearers or any other physician having some
knowledge of physiological chemistry will take the pains to read this section of Pasteur's
memoir with attention, he will see for himself that yeast cannot be so produced, and he
can prove it by making the experiment as described.
Now mark what, supposing I am right in this, this memoir does prove. It proves that
Pasteur was so ignorant of physiological chemistry that he believed yeast could be so
produced, or else he was so confident of the ignorant confidence of the medical profession
in himself, that he believed he could bluff it through. In this last belief, he was
correct for a time. I cannot but believe that the exposure I am making of Pasteur's
ignorance and dishonesty will lead to a serious overhauling of all his work.
It was Bechamp who discovered and expounded the theory of antisepsis which Pasteur
permitted to be ascribed to himself. In his 'Studies on Fermentation,' Pasteur published a
letter from Lord Lister, then Mr. Surgeon Lister, in which that gentleman claims that he
learned the principles of antisepsis from Pasteur. I do not doubt this statement of the
noble Lord, for besides accepting Mr. Lister as a gentleman of veracity, I will give you
an additional reason for accepting that statement.
* Lister's Blunder
When Mr Lister began his antiseptic operations, they were generally successful, but a
few days later his patients succumbed to carbolic acid or mercuric poisoning, so that it
became a gruesome medical joke to say 'The operation was successful, but the patient
Now Mr Lister, though a very skilled surgeon and, I believe, having great powers of
observation, had established the technique of his operations upon the teachings of a man
who had plagiarized the discovery without understanding the principle upon which it was
based. Not unnaturally, Lister used doses of carbolic acid, which, when placed upon an
open wound or respired by a patient were lethal. But, thanks to his careful observations,
he gradually reduced the quantity of carbolic acid or sublimate of mercury employed, until
at last ' his operations were successful and the patients lived,' as they would have done
from the beginning, had he obtained his knowledge of the principles of antisepsis from
their discoverer, who had warned against the use of any but a very minute dose of carbolic
acid, instead of from their plagiarist, who did not know why the dose should be so
From the outline I have now given you, you may form some idea of the ignorance of the
man who, for more than thirty years, official medicine has been worshipping as a little
god. But this is only a small part of the mischief perpetrated. Instead of making progress
in therapeutics during the past thirty or forty years, medicine - outside of surgery - has
fearfully retrograded, and the medical profession today is, in my judgment, in a more
degraded condition than ever before in its history. I know that at first your minds will
rebel against this statement, but some facts will prove to every mind possessed of common
sense that it is true.&
The Danger of Inoculating
After discussing the practice of medicine in the past and saying that since Jenner's
and Pasteur's days the modern effort is to make sick well, he says of inoculations:
&When a drug is administered by the mouth, as was beautifully pointed out by Dr J.
Garth Wilkinson, in proceeding along the alimentary canal it encounters along its whole
line a series of chemical laboratories, wherein it is analysed, synthesized, and
deleterious matter prepared for excretion, and finally excreted, or it may be ejected from
the stomach, or overcome by an antidote.
But when nature's coat of mail, the skin, is violated, and the drug inserted beneath
the skin, nature's line of defence is taken in the rear, and rarely can anything be done
to hinder or prevent the action of the drug, no matter how injurious, even fatal it may
be. All the physicians of the world are incompetent either to foresee its action or to
hinder it. Even pure water has been known to act as a violent and foudroyant poison when
injected into the blood stream. How much more dangerous is it, then, to inject poisons
known to be such, whether modified in the fanciful manner at present fashionable among
Vivisectionists or in any other manner. These simple considerations show that inoculation
should be regarded as malpractice to be tolerated only in case of extreme danger where the
educated physician sees no other chance of saving life.
The Germ Theory Fetish
Now the forcing of these inoculations upon individuals by law is one of the worst of
tyrannies imaginable, and should be resisted, even to the death of the official who is
enforcing it. English speaking people need to have ideals of liberty refreshed by a study
of the history of Wat Tyler, who headed one of the most justifiable rebellions in history,
and although treacherously murdered by the then Lord Mayor of London, his example should
be held up to all our children for imitation ...&
But rev the entire fabric of the germ theory of disease rests upon
assumptions which not only have not been proved, but which are incapable of proof, and
many of them can be proved to be the reverse of truth. The basic one of these unproven
assumptions, the credit for which in its present form is wholly due to Pasteur, is the
hypothesis that all the so called infectious and contagious disorders are caused by germs,
each disease having its own specific germ, which germs have existed in the air from the
beginning of things, and that though the body is closed to these pathogen's germs when in
good health, when the vitality is lowered the body becomes susceptible to their
I agree most heartily with Dr Leverson's statement that &the forcing of these
inoculations upon individuals by law is one of the worst tyrannies imaginable, and should
be resisted even to the death of the official who is enforcing it.& Strong words, but
absolutely right!
Professor F. W. Newman of Oxford University has said:
&Against the body of a healthy man Parliament has no right of assault whatever
under pretence
nor any the more against the body of a healthy
infant. To forbid perfect health is a tyrannical wickedness, just as much as to forbid
chastity or sobriety. No lawgiver can have the right. The law is an unendurable
usurpation, and creates the right of resistance.&
And Blackstone says:
&No laws are binding upon the human subject which assault the body or violate the
conscience.&
In the case of the Union Pacific Railway vs Botsford, the United States Supreme Court
&... no right is held more sacred or is more carefully guarded by the common law
than the right of every individual to the possession and control of his own person, free
from all restraint or interference of others, unless by clear and unquestioned authority
As well said by Judge Cooley:
&The right of one's person may be said to be a right
let alone.&
(Cooley on Torts 29)
&The inviolability of the person is as much invaded by a compulsory stripping as
by a blow. To compel anyone, and especially a woman, to lay bare the body or to submit it
to the touch of a stranger, without lawful authority, is an indignity, an assault, and a
trespass.& (141 U.S. 250)
In 1903 Judge Woodward of the New York Appellate Court said in the Viemeister case:
&It may be conceded that the legislature has no constitutional right to compel any
person to vaccination.&
(84 N.Y. Supp. 712)
In the Supreme Court, Columbia County, N.Y., in 1910, Judge Le Boeuf, in the second
trial of the Bolinger case, instructed the jury as follows:
&Now I have charged you that the assault which is claimed to have existed here due
to the forcible vaccination, that is, if it was against this man's will, is one which you
must consider. And the reason of that is: This man, in the eyes of the law, just as you
and I and all of us in this courtroom, has the right to be let alone. We all h