Complete Record - Heirs of Hippocrates No. 1897

LOUIS PASTEUR (1822-1895) Études sur la maladie des vers à soie. Gauthier-Villars 1870 Vol. I: xii, 322 pp., front., illus., plates (part col.); Vol. II: [6] 327 pp., plate. 22.3 cm.

The French chemist and microbiologist Pasteur may well be the best-known scientist the world has ever known. The variety and number of his important discoveries make it difficult to select which are the two or three most important. Certainly his work on fermentation (see No. 1898), which led to the pasteurization process, had ramifications far beyond the beer and wine industries for which it was originally undertaken. The present work is one of his most important, dealing with his studies on a disease of silkworms which was ruining the French silk industry. He isolated the bacillus causing the disease and devised the method by which it would be eliminated. From this study he turned to a study of fowl cholera and anthrax, again isolating the specific bacilli causing the diseases and finding that prevention and cure could be effected by inoculation with artificially grown cultures of the bacilli producing the disease. This led to what is perhaps his best-known discovery, a curative vaccine for hydrophobia.

See Related Record(s): 1898

Cited references: Cushing P140; Garrison-Morton 2481; Osler 1549

Gift of John Martin, M.D.