Louis Pasteur (1822-1895) was appointed Professor of Geology, Physics & Chemistry, École nationale superieure des Beaux-Arts in Paris to 1867. In this period he perfected, with physiologist Claude Bernard (1813-1878), experiments on heat-control of microbial processes in fluids such as milk and wine which led to pasteurization. He further generalised his ideas of beverage-souring to human diseases similarly caused by invisible microbes (yeasts, fungi, bacteria), influencing Joseph Lister. In 1858 he published Mémoire sur la fermentation appelée lactique [Memoir on Lactic Fermentation]. — the foundation stone of the cell theory, microbiology, and bacteriology.
Pasteur also decisively contradicted the current ideas of spontaneous chemical generation and furthered the germ theory of disease, which claimed unicellular microbes as pathogenic agents. He is also known for his celebrated experiments with swan's-neck flasks whose contents remained sterile in the absence of air, experiments that won him the Alhumbert Prize of the French Academy of Sciences, 1862.
In 1885 Pasteur and Émile Roux made their celebrated first application of a vaccine described as for "canine madness" by "the cautious inoculation of micro-organisms in various degrees of attenuation" (CF 140). The bacterial hypothesis proved to be wrong, though "cow-pox virus" was a long-standing description from the earlier work of Jenner on Variolae Vaccinae of 1798. Until 1896 and the pioneering bacteriophage work of Hankin, the terms virus, microbe, and bacterium were largely interchangeable and scarcely differentiated.
Pasteur's notebooks and papers were held by family until 1971, then donated to the Bibliothèque Nationale de France. Geison (1995) introduced new materials to Pasteur's scientific biography while stirring controversy over Pasteur's priorities, publications, and ethics.
Bibliography
Bulloch, William. The History of Bacteriology. University of London Heath Clark Lectures for 1936. Oxford: O.U.P., 1938.
de Kruif, Paul. Microbe Hunters. New York: Harcourt Brace & Co., 1926.
Geison, Gerald. The Private Science of Louis Pasteur. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995.
Herter, Christian A. The Influence of Pasteur on Medical Science: An Address to the Medical School of Johns Hopkins University. New York: Dodd, Mead & Co., 1904.
Nicolle, J. Louis Pasteur. A Master of Scientific Enquiry. London: Hutchinson, 1971.
Created 9 December 2016
Last modified 16 February 2023