The Story of Louis Pasteur

One day, more than a hundred years ago, a French boy called Louis Pasteur was playing with his friends in Arbors, the little town that was his home.

Suddenly there came a sound of running feet and voices of people shouting.

Louis looked up. “What was happened?” he asked a man standing near him.

“Someone has been bitten,” said the man.

“By a mad dog?” asked Louis.

The man looked frightened. “No,” he said, “not dog – a wolf. A mad wolf came down from the mountains.”

Louis hurried home. A mad wolf! He too felt afraid, and he was glad to reach the safety of the house.

The mad wolf was suffering from a disease called rabies, and then common in France, and the man who had been bitten would probably take the disease, and suffer terribly, and die.

Louis did not forget that day; through he did not then know that later in this life he would discover a way of preventing the disease.

When Louis left school, he trained himself as a scientist. At first, he worked at problem in chemistry, making discoveries for which he became famous.

Soon he began to interest himself in such questions as; what makes wine and beer ferment? Why do wine and beer sometimes go sour? And what sours milk?

He discovered that when milk, wine sours, the change is brought about by the presence of certain bacteria, very tiny and simply living plantlike things that cannot be seen with the naked eye. Pasteur was able to observe them through his microscope.

He found that the bacteria that cause souring can be liked by heat, by raising the temperature a certain length of time.

Heat treatment of wine, beer milk etc. is still carried out today, and, in honor of Pasteur, it is known as pasteurization.

We now know that pasteurization destroys not only bacteria that cause souring but also germs that cause disease to human beings.

Another field in which Pasteur worked as a scientist was the study of disease germs. The germs of certain diseases are bacteria, but other diseases are caused by viruses, which are too small to be seen with the kind of microscope that was in use in Pasteur’s time.

Pasteur studied a number of animal diseases. One of these was anthrax, a disease that can also affect men. At that, time anthrax killed many sheep and cattle in France.

Pasteur discovered how to grow anthrax bacteria that were much less powerful than those found in diseased animals.

He showed by experiment that if animals were inoculated with the weakened bacteria and then infected with powerful bacteria, they would not die.

Pasteur’s idea of protecting people against disease by inoculating them with much weakened bacteria or viruses (nowadays, in some cases, with dead bacteria) has been worked upon by other scientists, and today we can be inoculated against typhoid, diphtheria, and other diseases.

But Pasteur himself had other great discoveries to make in this field, the most important being the discovery of how to prevent rabies. He had never forgotten the man in Arbois who was bitten by the mad wolf.

The germ that causes rabies is a virus, too small to be seen under an ordinary microscope. Dogs, wolves, jackals, other animals, and men may take the disease.

Pasteur removed the infected parts of rabbits suffering from rabies and, by treating these parts, obtained the virus in a weakened form.

With this, he inoculated animals. Some he inoculated before causing them to be bitten or otherwise infected. Some he inoculated after they had received an injection of the rabies germs. In both cases, the animals remained healthy, and did not develop the terrible symptoms of the disease.

So far, Pasteur’s patients had been animals. He had not ventured to try his methods of human beings, for it was by no means certain that the treatment would have the same effect on them as on animals. Then one day-the 6th of July, 1885, a very memorable day for Pasteur- a woman came to him in great distress.

“Save my son!” she cried. “Save him, sir! He has been bitten by a mad dog. He is covered with bites.”

The boy had indeed been badly bitten. But even so, it was absolutely certain that he could take the disease and die. What was Pasteur to do? Should he try on a human being the treatment that had been so successful with animals?

He decided that he must.

He took the boy into his own home so as to watch him carefully, and gave him a series of inoculations. He waited anxiously to see what would happen.

At last the danger period had passed. The boy was well and strong again. A method of preventing rabies had been found!

Pasteur’s frame spread, and he received honors from many countries.

In 1888, the French Government founded the Pasteur institute in Paris. Here further experiments could be carried out and patients could go there to be treated.

What has all this to do with India? Just as much as it has to do with the rest of the world; for India, too, has benefited from the discoveries made by the French scientists. Here, in our own country, Pasteur Institutes carry on the work of preparing vaccines and furthering research into the many problems which still confront the scientist in his battle against disease.