The Life of Pasteur — René Vallery-Radot
You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org . If you are not located in the United States, you will have to check the laws of the country where you are located before using this eBook. Title : The life of Pasteur Author : René Vallery-Radot Author of introduction, etc. : Sir William Osler Translator : Mrs. R. L. Devonshire Release date : December 18, 2019 [eBook #60956] Most recently updated: October 17, 2024 Language : English Other information and formats : www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/60956 Credits : Produced by Turgut Dincer, Chuck Greif and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net (This book was produced from images made available by the HathiTrust Digital Library.) *** START OF Index : A , B , C , D , E , F , G , H , I , J , K , L , M , N , O , P , Q , R , S , T , U , V , W , Y , Z Some minor typographical errors have been corrected. (etext transcriber's note) THE LIFE OF PASTEUR “L’œuvre de Pasteur est admirable; elle montre son génie, mais il faut avoir vécu dans son intimité pour connaître toute la bonté de son cœur.”— Dr. Roux. LOUIS PASTEUR. THE LIFE OF PASTEUR BY RENÉ VALLERY-RADOT TRANSLATED FROM THE FRENCH BY MRS. R. L. DEVONSHIRE WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY SIR WILLIAM OSLER, BART., M.D., F.R.S. REGIUS PROFESSOR OF MEDICINE, OXFORD UNIVERSITY NEW YORK DOUBLEDAY, PAGE & COMPANY 1920 Printed in Great Britain by Richard Clay & Sons, Limited , BRUNSWICK ST., STAMFORD ST., S.E. 1, AND BUNGAY, SUFFOLK. INTRODUCTION L’homme en ce siècle a pris une connaissance toute nouvelle des ressource de la nature et, par l’application de son intelligence il a commencé à les faire fructifier. Il a refait, par la géologie et la paléontologie, l’histoire de la terre, entraînée elle-même par la grande loi de l’évolution. Il connaît mieux, grâce à Pasteur surtout, les conditions d’existence de son propre organisme et peut entreprendre d’y combattre les causes de destruction.—Monod, L’Europe Contemporaine . 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 importance—a knowledge of the true nature of the processes in fermentation—a knowledge of the chief maladies which have scourged man and animals—a knowledge of the measures by which either the body may be protected against these diseases, or the poison neutralised when once within the body. I. 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 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 discovered—cinchona, 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 Pasteur’s 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 expressed—so far as I know—by 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 animalculæ, 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 Ca