This article was originally published in The Laws of Life, Volume 28, page 246 M. Pasteur, in his instructions to the French Scientific Commission sent to Egypt to investigate the nature of cholera, acts on the hypothesis that the disease enters the human organism by the digestive canal, and not through the air passages. It is directed that all articles …
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Defying a Century of Epidemiology
In 1854, as a cholera epidemic killed hundreds in London, an English physician named John Snow was determined to find out how the disease was transmitted. Snow’s work came as Louis Pasteur and other pioneers were beginning to probe the microbial world of bacteria. Together, they helped establish the new science of epidemiology, the study of disease and how it …
Read More »What Doesn’t Kill You, Makes You Stronger
The scientific approaches to use scorpion venom, E coli, and the common cold as potential cures for cancer are reminiscent of the studies of Louis Pasteur. In studying chicken cholera, Pasteur noted that one of sample cultures of cholera inducing bacteria had spoiled and failed to infect some chickens with a deadly dose of the disease. Read the full article…
Read More »Vaccine Milestones: Louis Pasteur
In the last quarter of the 19th century, scientists identified bacteria as the cause of many diseases, including cholera, typhoid fever, anthrax, plague, diphtheria, and tuberculosis. In France microbiologist and chemist Louis Pasteur had noticed that cultures of fowl cholera lost their virulence if they were left inactive for two weeks. When chickens were inoculated with the old cultures, they …
Read More »Pasteur and His Wonderful Experiments
Originally published in “The Dial, Volume VI” in 1886 At the recent International Medical Congress, held in the city of Copenhagen, among all the men who have distinguished themselves in the cultivation of the sciences pertaining to medicine, the one most signally honored was the subject of this biographical sketch. When he appeared in the public assemblies of the delegates …
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