Louis Pasteur: His Life and LaboursVallery-Radot, René
Science
Louis Pasteur: His Life and Labours
Vallery-Radot, René
Pasteur, Louis, 1822-1895; Scientists -- France -- Biography
But Pasteur was not content with simply destroying the ferments of
these diseases, he wished above all to prevent their introduction. At
the moment when the wort is raised to the boiling-point, when the germs
of disease are destroyed by the heat, if the cooling of the wort is
effected in contact with both air and yeast free from exterior germs,
the beer may be made under conditions of exceptional purity. Some
brewers, taking for their basis Pasteur's principles, constructed an
apparatus which enabled them to protect the wort while it was cooling
from the organisms of the air, and to ferment this wort with a leaven
as pure as possible. At the Exhibition of Amsterdam there might be
seen bottles half full, containing a perfectly clear beer, which had
been tapped from the time of opening of the Exhibition. This was French
beer, manufactured according to Pasteur's principles, by a great
brewer of Marseilles, M. Velten. The happy effect of these studies
is universally recognised. At Copenhagen, M. Jacobsen has had a bust
of Pasteur, by Paul Dubois, placed in the _salle d'honneur_ of his
celebrated laboratory.
* * * * *
In terminating his _Studies on Beer_, Pasteur recalled to mind the
principles which for twenty years had directed his labours, the
resources and applications of which appeared to him unlimited. 'The
etiology of contagious diseases,' he wrote with a scientific certainty
of conviction, 'is on the eve of having unexpected light shed upon it.'
_VIRULENT DISEASES._
SPLENIC FEVER (CHARBON)--SEPTICÆMIA.
'He that thoroughly understands the nature of ferments and
fermentations,' said the physicist Robert Boyle, 'shall probably be
much better able than he that ignores them, to give a fair account of
divers phenomena of certain diseases (as well fevers as others), which
will perhaps be never properly understood without an insight into the
doctrine of fermentations.'
At all times, medical theories, more particularly those which concern
the etiology of virulent diseases, have had to encounter the opposition
of explanations invented to account for the phenomena of fermentation.
When Pasteur in 1856 began his labours on these subjects, the ideas
of Liebig were everywhere revived. Like the ferments, so the viruses
and processes of disease were considered as the results of atomic
motions proper to substances in course of molecular change, and able to
communicate themselves to the diverse constituents of the living body.
The researches of Pasteur on the part played by microscopic organisms
in fermentation, changed the course of these ideas. The ancient
medical theory of parasites and living contagia was revived. A German
Professor, Dr. Traube, in 1864, put forward, in one of his clinical
lectures, a new doctrine of the ammoniacal fermentation of urine.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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