Microzymas, Semmelweis, Bechamp, Pasteur, Lister

Katherine Watt

Mar 26

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The work of Antoine Bechamp has crossed my field of vision mostly through the work of Tracey Northern.

Last week, Bechamp's name appeared in a chapter of Fr. Denis Fahey's 1953 book, The Church and Farming, at pp. 98-101.

Chemical Fertilizers and Microzymas
An important point stressed by Lord Geddes in the English House of Lords, in February, 1944, must be mentioned here. In the course of a very interesting debate on the soil in relation to the health of man, animal and plant, Lord Geddes said:
"There is no doubt whatever that you can produce from the fields a great quantity of food by the use of chemical fertilizers. You can boost production, and that is what I think has blinded a great many people to the real problem. The food that we eat and the foodstuffs which we absorb into our body fluids, and through them into our body tissues, are divided sharply into two parts, possibly more, but certainly sharply into two parts — the part which is required as fuel to provide the energy for movement...and the part which is required to repair and replace and recreate our actual bodies themselves.
The German school — Virchow, Schwann, Liebig — laid the emphasis upon the cell out of which in their millions our bodies are created and they regarded food for the cell as all all that was required....
Obliterated and eclipsed by the German school...there was a French school, of which Professor Bechamp was the leader, working at
Montpelier in the fifties of the last century. This school had quite a different idea about the structure of the body and the vitality and vigor of the body, and I think that it was a great pity...that a great deal of the work of Professor Bechamp was entirely ignored and overlooked.
One of the great contributions he made, a contribution with which I have been familiar now for over thirty years, to the whole idea of life, was that the cell was not the unit of life, but that there was a much smaller, more minute unit of life which he called in his later reports to the Academy of Science the microzymas, but which in his earlier reports he had always referred to as the 'little bodies.'...
These little living bodies, which exist in organic matter even long after it has been dead as an organism, have the power quite definitely of organizing life, because they are themselves alive...These little living bodies are not present in the artificial chemical manures, and it may be that the German school, which we in this country largely followed in biology for many years, overlooked something of great importance, and it may be that it is necessary for our human bodies, if they are to maintain their full vitality, to be receiving in their food a continuous supply of these little living bodies.
We all get a certain number of these every day, but it may well be — and this is the point that is really at issue between the schools of thought — that, because these little living bodies are not present in sufficient quantities in a man's or woman's food, he or she begins to lose the physical capacity for vitality. And that is the point at issue. There is a real divergence of opinion between two schools which have existed for a long time, one of which has become dominant and out of whose practice and beliefs the whole of the chemical fertilizer industry has arisen. This school has been able to show results of the most remarkable kind in boosting production in the plant's growth and those portions of the food which are required as fuels.
I do not know how many of your Lordships are accustomed to handle a microscope, but if you are and you can get in a dark field of illumination a drop of your own blood you can see them. They shine like stars. In the course of this week I have seen a great many drops of blood under the microscope, and the difference between people fed in different ways and in different states of health is really quite extraordinary. That is where this controversy really leads...
It leads straight to one point, and one point only. Is the supply of these little living bodies in the food essential to continued vitality of human beings or is it not?...
A great many things have happened recently to shake the predominance of the German school. It no longer carries the full conviction which it did when I was a student forty-five years ago...I trust that nothing I have said will be taken as meaning that this thing is true; but there is undoubtedly the possibility, many think the extreme probability, that the presence of these little living bodies — microzymas, as Professor Bechamp called them — in the food is essential to vitality in health. The cannot come into the food grown on the fields unless there are a great many little living bodies of that sort in the soil, because they come from the soil. They cannot apparently get into the soil unless they come from living matter before...That, as I see it is the problem."
As Professor Bechamp's life work is comparatively unknown, it may be useful to quote here a few sentences from a philosophical treatise by Pere de Bonniot, S.J., of which the second edition appeared in 1879. It is entitled Les Malheurs de la Philosophie [The Misfortunes of Philosophy], and consists of a series of studies of contemporary positivity and materialism. In the course of these studies, the learned Jesuit utilizes the conclusions of Professor Bechamp against certain materialists, and speaks of his work as follows:
"Mr. Bechamp concludes: 'The role of the microzymas is immense: They are at the beginning and the end of every living being!' A word is missing.. He should have said: 'The microzymas are at the beginning, the middle, and the end of all organic life.' Those microscopic beings, the smallest known, seem in very truth to be one of the foundations of the animal world. By their discoveries in this department, the work of the illustrious professor and his learned assistants deserves to take rank amongst the outstanding achievements of this century."

Ignaz Semmelweis and cadaveric contamination

A couple of months ago I noticed some things about Ignaz Semmelweis and his work.

Semmelweis noticed differences in morbidity and mortality (childbed fever or puerperal sepsis) between women in childbirth attended by physicians who had come directly from autopsy work on dead bodies, and women attended by midwives who did not conduct autopsies, which suggested that the harmful agents were in the blood and tissues of the dead bodies undergoing putrefaction and transferred on the hands of the physicians, not floating around in the air generally.

Louis Pasteur and Joseph Lister later twisted Semmelweis' work to make it seem to support the "germ theory" of airborne, air-transmissible pathogens as causative agents of disease, by suppressing the link to cadavers, autopsies, and the carrying of blood and tissue on physicians’ hands directly to women giving birth.

Prompted by a footnote to the passage published in Fr. Fahey's 1951 book (above), I downloaded Bechamp or Pasteur, a book published in 1923 by Ethel Douglas Hume, and The Blood and Its Third Anatomical Component, a book by Antoine Bechamp published in French in 1908 and translated/published in English in 1912 by Montague Levenson. (Alternate version)

Today I had a look at the table of contents for the Hume book and noticed "The Origin of Preventative Medicine" chapter at p. 189, which includes a mention of Semmelweis.

"It was at the commencement of the year 1873 that Pasteur was elected by a majority of one vote to a place among the Free Associates of the Academy of Medicine. His ambition had indeed spurred him to open "a new era in medical physiology and pathology," but it would seem to have been unfortunate for the world that instead of putting forward the fuller teaching of Bechamp, he fell back upon the cruder ideas now popularly known as the germ-theory of disease.
It is astonishing to find that he even used his powerful influence with the Academy of Science to anathematize the very name of "microzyma," so much so that M. Fremy, the friend of Bechamp, declared that he dared not utter the word before that august assemblage.
As a name was, however, required for air-borne micro-organisms, Pasteur accepted the nomenclature "microbe" suggested by the surgeon, Sedillot, a former Director of the Army Medical School at Strasbourg.
The criticism might be passed that this term is an etymological solecism. The Greeks used the word Macrobiorus to denote races of long-lived people, and now a name, concocted from Greek words for short-lived, was conferred upon micro-organisms, whose parent-stem, the microzyma, Bechamp had described as "physiologically imperishable."
Man, who so seldom lasts a century, might better be called a microbe, and the microzyma a macrobe!
It was not till 1878 that Sedillot put forward his suggestion; but before this, Pasteur had been busy nominating micro-organisms as direct agents of varying troubles, and in 1874 he was gratified by an appreciative letter from Lister.
The latter wrote that the Pasteurian germ-theory of putrefaction had furnished him "with the principle upon which alone the antiseptic system can be carried out."
However, let us turn to that verdict of time, which, according to Pasteur's own dictum, must pronounce judgment on a scientist. Before the last Royal Commission on Vivisection, which sat from 1906 to 1908, Sir Henry Morris, President of the Royal College of Surgeons, wishing to make out the best case that was possible for Pasteur, had, all the same, to acknowledge:—"In consequence of further researches and experience some modification of the technique first introduced by Lord Lister occurred, and the evolution of the aseptic method resulted."
Dr. Wilson points out 3 in his Reservation Memorandum of the Royal Commission, that "the basis of aseptic surgery, which in essence is clean surgery, was laid, as stated in the Report and in reply to a question by Sir William Collins, by Semmelweiss before 1850, who attributed the blood-poisoning which devastated his lying-in wards in a Viennese hospital to putrid infection and strongly urged cleanliness as a means of preventing it."
Dr. Wilson shows how Lord Lister brought about the application of this advice as to cleanliness considerably before his ideas were moulded by Pasteur. This latter influence, this Pasteurian "Theory that the causa causans of septicism in wounds rested on micro-organisms in the air was an altogether mistaken theory."
It was on this "mistaken theory," this "principle," provided for him by Pasteur, that Lord Lister based his use of the carbolic spray, of which, before the Medical Congress in Berlin, in 1891, he made the honest recantation:—"I feel ashamed that I should ever have recommended it for the purpose of destroying the microbes in the air."
Thus pronounces the verdict of time against the theories of Pasteur; while, as regards the teaching of Bechamp, what do we find?
Dr. Wilson continues:—"The real source of all the mischief was the unclean or putrefying matter which might be conveyed by hands, dressings, or other means, to freshly made wounds."
Such contamination is exactly explained by the microzymian doctrine, which teaches that this putrefying matter with its morbid microzymas might affect the normal condition of the inherent microzymas of the body, with which it comes into contact. Thus the verdict of time corroborates Bechamp.
Pasteur declared danger to arise from atmospheric microbes. He talked of "invaded patients,"and triumphantly chalked upon a blackboard the chain-like organism that he called the germ of puerperal fever.
Bechamp maintained that in free air even morbid microzymas and bacteria soon lose their morbidity, and that inherent organisms are the starting points of septic and other troubles.
What was Lord Lister's final judgment after having abandoned the method into which he was misled by Pasteur?
We give it in his own words as quoted by Dr. George Wilson: "The floating particles of the air may be disregarded in our surgical work, and if so, we may dispense with anti-septic washing and irrigation, provided always that we can trust ourselves and our assistants to avoid the introduction into the wound of septic defilement from other than atmospheric sources."

Disease causality through blood- and tissue-borne organisms transferred from decomposing humans and animals into breaks in the skin of recipients — not through airborne "germs" — supports and is supported by observed induction of anaphylaxis, disease and death by forcible introduction/injection of biological matter (collected from animal wounds, and/or propagated from bacteria and other organisms) into the bloodstream of humans and animals, as published by Charles Richet, Milton J. Rosenau of the US-Public Health Service and others in the 1890s and 1900s, and now being described by Sasha Latypova in her written work and video interviews.

Sept. 9, 2024 - Anaphylaxis by vaccines - discussion with Dr. Jane Ruby (Sasha Latypova)

Microzymas theory of health and disease also supports and finds support in the work of Sabine Hazan on gut microbiota.

March 24, 2023 - Conversation with Dr. Sabine Hazan (Sasha Latypova) - “…Once you start thinking in terms of microbiome, the virus-no-virus debate turns into a false binary, as it should. That’s because, as typical of these angry debates, they are not based on asking the right questions. Health as absence of illness, and presence of vitality, stability and longevity can be attributed to a vibrant, resilient microbiome which is to your body as good soil is to a well tended garden…”