ABSTRACT
Young Charles Richet had grown to manhood during the relatively affluent early days of the Third Republic, blessed with wealth and social influence. Richet became professor at thirty-seven, a very young age for his day. Richet's lecture emphasized the importance of physics and chemistry to physiology and furthermore that medicine itself is an extension of physiology. Like Rudolph Ludwig Karl Virchow, Richet considered physiology as a social and a biological science. In essence Richet was an intellectual with limitless curiosity who felt responsible for maintaining and advancing the noble qualities of man and the glory of France. Richet had hoped his laboratory would become a foyer intellectuel for young medical scientists, a launching pad, as it were, for brilliant young people. Richet seized an opportunity to test the possibility of immunization against cancer offered in 1894 by the affliction of his sister-in-law's sixteen-year-old daughter, Amelie Vian, with an abdominal cancer.
