Bechamp or Pasteur?

Ethel Hume

• Publisher: A Distant Mirror
• Year: 2020
• eBook ISBN: 9780648859475
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Medicine
• Subtopic: Alternative & Complementary Medicine

This volume contains new editions of two books.

R. Pearson's Pasteur, Plagiarist, Imposter, originally published in 1942, serves as the introduction. It details some of the reasons for the rancorous relationship between Louis Pasteur and Antoine Béchamp. Pearson points out many of the problems in Pasteur's work, and provides details, statistics and evidence to support his case. Some of the frauds which were eventually admitted by the Pasteur Institute are mentioned here.

Ethel Hume's Béchamp or Pasteur?, originally published in 1923, is the larger work, and provides the main body of evidence, in three parts:

1. The Mystery of Fermentation

2. The Microzymas

3. The Cult of the Microbe

This book is a compelling and thorough account of Pasteur's plagiarism and scientific fraud. It contains the evidence of the false grounds on which the germ theory of disease was elevated to its current status as a dogma, and beyond question. In this forgotten chapter of the history of biology and medicine, we are shown how powerful interests and agendas have prevailed over genuine science.Here are strong reminders of the powers which control the pharmaceutical and regulatory industries to this day.

Hume details the contention between Béchamp and Pasteur, and presents ample references to the original source material and supporting evidence. No claim is left undocumented or unsupported. Both authors are clearly not fans of Pasteur or his corruption of the principles of science, and they declare their intentions openly. They seek to undo a massive medical and scientific fraud. This new edition of their work is presented with the same intent.

The real facts, which have been suppressed for so long, should be revealed to the world. Modern science needs to return to this bifurcation point, and take the pleomorphic path. When this phenomenon is truly understood, many aspects of modern medical thought will disappear, as do all things which outlive their usefulness. In Béchamp's work, we can see on display the foundations of the quantum biology and epigenetics which inform the work of such modern researchers as Joe Dispenza, Gregg Braden, and Bruce Lipton.

This is a foundational text of the new biology, and should be required reading for anyone seeking to understand how the body actually functions and heals. This book should be read by every doctor, health professional, nutritionist, and biologist.

"Nothing is lost, nothing is created... everything is transformed. Nothing is the prey of death. Everything is the prey of life."

- Antoine Béchamp

CONTENTS

Pasteur: Plagiarist, Imposter / R. Pearson

Béchamp or Pasteur? / Ethel Hume

Part 1: The Mystery of Fermentation

A Babel of Theories / Pasteur's Memoirs of 1857 / Béchamp's 'Beacon Experiment' / Claims and Contradictions / The Soluble Ferment / Rival Theories and Worker

Part 1

 

The Mystery of Fermentation

A Babel of Theories

BEFORE STARTING ANY EXAMINATION of the contributions of Béchamp and Pasteur to the scientific problems of their age, it may be well to consider the utter confusion of ideas then reigning in the scientific world in regard to the mysteries of life and death, and to the phenomenon of fermentation.

This chapter will give a quick outline of the absence of clarity surrounding these leading questions; and though the work of earlier scientists invariably led up to subsequent discovery, yet in the days when Antoine Béchamp and Louis Pasteur commenced their work, the understanding of the subject was, as we shall see, in a state of confusion.

Three paramount problems faced scientific inquirers of the time:

1. What is living matter, this ‘protoplasm’ (so-called from Greek words meaning first and formed)? Is it a mere chemical compound?

2. How does it come into being? Can it arise spontaneously, or must it always be derived from pre-existing life?

3. What causes matter to undergo the change known as ‘fermentation’?

Among Professor Béchamp’s prolific writings, much discussion may be found of the confused babel of theories on these subjects.

To start with the first question:

What is living matter?

There was merely the vague explanation that protoplasm is the living matter from which all kinds of living beings are formed and to the properties of which all are ultimately referred.

There was belief in a substance called albumen, best represented by the white of egg, which was said to mix with certain mineral and other matters without changing its nature. J. Dumas demonstrated that such ‘albuminoids’ comprise not one specific thing, but many different bodies; but the contrary opinion prevailed, and for such substances ‘protoplasm’ was adopted as a convenient term.

It was ‘the physical basis of life’, according to Huxley; but this hardly illumined the difficulty, for to pronounce protoplasm to be living matter per se was not to explain the mystery of how it was so, or its origin and composition. True, Huxley further declared all living matter more or less to resemble albumen, or white of egg; but this latter was also not understood by either biologists or chemists.

Charles Robin regarded it as being of the type of the mucoids – that is to say, as resembling mucus, which itself was so shrouded in mystery that Oken called it Urschleim (primordial slime), and the botanist Hugo Mohl identified it with protoplasm, thus dignifying mucus as the physical basis of all things living!

Claude Bernard tried to determine the relation of protoplasm to organisation and life, and combated the general idea that every living body must be morphologically constituted, that is to say, have some structural formation. He argued that protoplasm gave the lie to this belief by its own structural indefiniteness. Charles Robin followed the same view, and gave the name of blastéme, from the Greek word meaning to sprout, to the supposed primordial source of living forms.

This was nothing but the old idea of living matter, whether called protoplasm or blastéme. A cell, a fibre, a tissue – any anatomical element – was regarded as living simply because of its formation by this primordial substance. Organisation was said to be its ‘most excellent modification’.

In short, formless matter was supposed to be the source of all organised living forms. In a kind of despair of any experimental demonstration of organisation and life, a name was invented for a hypothetical substance magically alive, although structurally deficient. Imagination played more part in such a theory than deduction from tangible evidence. Thus we find that the physician Bichat, who made a name for himself in science before he died in 1802, at the early age of 31, could not accept such an explanation, and declared that the living parts of a living being were the organs formed of the tissues.

A great step was gained when Virchow thought he saw the cell in the process of being built up, that is, structured, and thus jumped to the conclusion that it is self-existent and the unit of life, from which proceed all organised forms of developed beings.

But here a difficulty arose, for the cell proved as transitory as any other anatomical element. Thus many scientists returned to the belief in primordial unstructured matter, and opinion oscillated between the views held by ‘cellularists’ and ‘protoplasmists’, as the opposing factions came to be known. Confusion reigned among the conflicting theories as they struggled to explain how a purely chemical compound, or mixture of such compounds, could be regarded as living, and all sorts of powers of modification and transformation were ascribed to it with which we need not concern ourselves here.

Instead, let us consider the second problem that faced Béchamp and Pasteur when they started work:

How does this mysterious living substance come into being? Can it arise spontaneously, or must it always be derived from pre-existing life?

It is hard to realise nowadays the heated controversy that raged in the past around this perplexing mystery. The opposing camps of thought were mainly divided into the followers of two eighteenth-century priests; Needham, who claimed that heat was sufficient to produce animalcule from putrescible matter, and Spallanzani, who denied their appearance in hermetically sealed vessels. The first were named Sponteparists because of their belief that organised life is in a constant state of emergence from chemical sources, while the second were named Panspermists because of their theory of a general diffusion of germs of life, originally brought into being at some primeval epoch.

For the latter view the teaching of Bonnet, following upon that of Buffon, was chiefly responsible; while Buffon’s ideas are reminiscent of the ancient system ascribed to Anaxagoras, according to whom the universe was formed of various elements as numerous as its different substances; e.g. gold was supposed to be formed of particles of gold; and a muscle, a bone, a heart, to be formed of particles of muscle, of bone, of heart. etc.

Buffon taught that a grain of sea salt is a cube composed of an infinite number of other cubes, and that there can be no doubt that the primary constituent parts of this salt are also cubes, which are beyond the powers of our eyes and even of our imagination.

This was an experimental fact, says Béchamp, and was the basis of the system of crystallography of Hauy.

Buffon argued in the same strain that

“in like manner that we see a cube of sea salt to be composed of other cubes, so we see that an elm is but a composite of other little elms.”

Bonnet’s ideas were somewhat similar; the central theme of his teaching being the universal diffusion of living germs:

“...capable of development only when they meet with suitable matrices or bodies of the same species fitted to hold them, to cherish them and make them sprout – it is the dissemination or panspermy that, in sowing germs on all sides, makes of the air, the water, the earth and all solid bodies vast and numerous magazines in which Nature has deposited her chief riches.”

He further maintained that

“the prodigious smallness of the germs prevents them from being attacked by the causes that bring about the dissolution of the mixtures. They enter into the interior of plants and of animals, they even become component parts of them, and when these composites undergo the law of dissolution they issue from them unchanged to float in the air, or in water, or to enter into other organised bodies.”

Such was the imaginative teaching with which Bonnet combated the doctrine of spontaneous generation. When it came to practical experimental proof, one party professed to demonstrate the origin of living organisms from putrescible matter in scaled vessels; the other party denied any such possibility ...

Table of contents

• Table of Contents
• Bechamp or Pasteur?
• Imprint
• About this book
• Antoine Bechamp
• Book One: Pasteur, Plagiarist, Imposter
• Author's note
• The Prior History of the ‘Germ Theory’
• Béchamp, Pasteur, and Fermentation
• Vinous Fermentation
• Béchamp’s Microzymas or ‘little bodies’
• Silkworm Disease: another steal!
• Pasteur also a Faker – Antisepsis
• Are Biologicals Injurious?
• Animal Serology: Anthrax
• Statistics
• Real Immunity
• Photographs
• Book Two: Bechamp or Pasteur?
• Author’s preface
• Introduction
• Part 1: The Mystery of Fermentation
• A Babel of Theories
• Pasteur’s Memoirs of 1857
• Béchamp’s ‘Beacon Experiment’
• Claims and Contradictions
• The Soluble Ferment
• Rival Theories and Workers
• Part 2: The Microzymas
• The ‘Little Bodies’
• Diseases of Silkworms
• Laboratory Experiments
• Nature’s Experiments
• A Plagiarism Frustrated
• Microzymas in General
• Modern Confirmations of Béchamp
• Part 3: The Cult of the Microbe
• The Origin of ‘Preventive Medicine’
• The International Medical Congress and some Pasteurian Fiascos
• Hydrophobia
• A Few Examples of the Cult in Theory and in Practice
• Some Lessons from World War I and a Few Reflections on World War II
• The Writing on the Wall
• Conclusion
• Also from A Distant Mirror