The life of Pasteur

The life of Pasteur

Whether to admire more the man or his method, the life or the work, I leave for the readers of this well-told story to decide. Among the researches that have made the name of Pasteur a household word in the civilised world, three are of the first importancea knowledge of the true nature of the processes in fermentationa knowledge of the chief maladies which have scourged man and animalsa knowledge of the measures by which either the body may be protected against these diseases, or the poison neutralised when once within the body. Our knowledge of disease has advanced in a curiously uniform way. The objective features, the symptoms, naturally first attracted attention. The Greek physicians, Hippocrates, Galen, and Aretaeus, gave excellent accounts of many diseases; for example, the forms of malaria. They knew, too, very well, their modes of termination, and the art of prognosis was studied carefully. But of the actual causes of disease they knew little or nothing, and any glimmerings of truth were obscured in a cloud of theory. The treatment was haphazard, partly the outcome of experience, partly based upon false theories of the cause of the disease. This may be said to have been the sort of knowledge possessed by the profession until{vi} men began to study the seats and causes of disease, and to search out the changes inside the body, corresponding to the outward symptoms and the external appearances. Morbid anatomy began to be studied, and in the hundred years from 1750 to 1850 such colossal strides were made that we knew well the post-mortem appearances of the more common diseases; the recognition of which was greatly helped by a study of the relation of the pathological appearances with the signs and symptoms. The 19th century may be said to have given us an extraordinarily full knowledge of the changes which disease produces in the solids and fluids of the body. Great advances, too, were made in the treatment of disease. We learned to trust Nature more and drugs less; we got rid (in part) of treatment by theory, and we ceased to have a drug for every symptom. But much treatment was, and still is, irrational, not based on a knowledge of the cause of the disease. In a blundering way many important advances were made, and even specifics were discoveredcinchona, for example, had cured malaria for a hundred and fifty years before Laveran found the cause. At the middle of the last century we did not know much more of the actual causes of the great scourges of the race, the plagues, the fevers and the pestilences, than did the Greeks. Here comes in Pasteurs great work. Before him Egyptian darkness; with his advent a light that brightens more and more as the years give us ever fuller knowledge. The facts that fevers were catching, that epidemics spread, that infection could remain attached to particles of clothing, etc., all gave support to the view that the actual cause was something alive, a contagium vivum. It was really a very old view, the germs of which may be found in the Fathers, but which was first clearly expressedso far as I knowby Frascastorius, a Veronese physician in the 16th century, who spoke of the seeds of contagion passing from one person to another; and he first drew a parallel between the processes of contagion and the fermentation of wine. This was more than one hundred years before Kircher, Leeuwenhoek, and others, began to use the microscope and to see{vii} animalcul, etc., in water, and so gave a basis for the infinitely little view of the nature of disease germs. And it was a study of the processes of fermentation that led Pasteur to the sure ground on which we now stand. Starting as a pure chemist, and becoming interested in the science of crystallography, it was not until his life at Lille, a town with important brewing industries, that Pasteur became interested in the biological side of chemical problems. Many years before it had been noted by Cagniard-Latour that yeast was composed of cells capable of reproducing themselves by a sort of budding, and he made the keen suggestion that it was possibly through some effect of their vegetation that the sugar was transformed. But Liebigs view everywhere prevailed that the ferment was an alterable, organic substance which exercised a catalytic force, transforming the sugar. It was in August, 1857, that Pasteur sent his famous paper on Lactic Acid Fermentation to the Lille Scientific Society; and in December of the same year he presented to the Academy of Sciences a paper on Alcoholic Fermentation, in which he concluded that the deduplication of sugar into alcohol and carbonic acid is correlevant to a phenomena of life. These studies had the signal effect of diverting the man from the course of his previous more strictly chemical studies. It is interesting to note how slowly these views dislocated the dominant theories of Liebig. More than ten years after their announcement I remember that we had in our chemical lectures the catalytic theory very fully presented. Out of these researches arose a famous battle which kept Pasteur hard at work for four or five yearsthe struggle over spontaneous generation. It was an old warfare, but the microscope had revealed a new world, and the experiments on fermentation had lent great weight to the omne vivum ex ovo doctrine. The famous Italians, Redi and Spallanzani, had led the way in their experiments, and the latter had reached the conclusion that there is no vegetable and no animal that has not its own germ. But heterogenesis became the burning question, and Pouchet in France, and Bastian in England,{viii} led the opposition to Pasteur. The many famous experiments carried conviction to the minds of scientific men, and destroyed for ever the old belief in spontaneous generation. All along the analogy between disease and fermentation must have been in Pasteurs mind; and then came the suggestion: What would be most desirable would be to push those studies far enough to prepare the road for a serious research into the origin of various diseases. If the changes in lactic, alcohol and butyric fermentations are due to minute living organisms, why should not the same tiny creatures make the changes which occur in the body in the putrid and suppurative diseases. With an accurate training as a chemist, having been diverted in his studies upon fermentation into the realm of biology, and nourishing a strong conviction of the identity between putrefactive changes of the body and fermentation, Pasteur was well prepared to undertake investigations, which had hitherto been confined to physicians alone. ......Buy Now (To Read More)

Product details

Ebook Number: 60956
Author: Vallery-Radot, René
Release Date: Dec 18, 2019
Format: eBook
Language: English

Contributors

Translator: Devonshire, R. L., Mrs., 1864-1949