CENTENNIAL CELEBRATION OF 



BIRTH OF LOUS PASTEUR AND 



GREGOR MENDEL 



I. PASTEUR'S CONTRIBUTION TO BACTERIOLOGY 

 AND MEDICINE 



Gayfree Ellison 

 Department of Bacteriology, University of Oklahoma. 



Thomas Carlyle has well said, "Universal history, the history 

 of what man has accomplished in the wOrld is, at bottom, the 

 history of the great men who have worked here." 



In medicine the achievements of certain mdividuals have 

 added greatly to the vvisdom and happiness of the world. Among 

 the outstanding figures the name of Louis Pasteur is perhaps the 

 greatest. Pasteur made a dozen discoveries any one of which 

 would have secured his fame for all time. 



The late Nicholas Senn says, "The discovery of the microbic 

 cause and real nature of inflammation was the first great triumph 

 of scientific medicine, and has contributed more to the prolonga- 

 tion of human life, and the mitigation of human suffering than all 

 previous medical knowledge which has accumulated from the 

 time medicine was first practiced and taught. We owe this dis- 

 covery to two men, Pasteur and Lister, who have conferred a 

 greater benefit upon the human race than any two mortals since 

 the world began." 



Pasteur has been called the "father of bacteriology." He 

 did not discover bacteria but he took the somewhat philosophical, 

 haphazard speculations concerning bacteria that had been carried 

 on for two hundred years previously, and in a few years estab- 

 lished a new science, a science that has had many brilliant achieve- 

 ments. He put biology upon a stable basis by settling and setting 

 aside once and for all the dispute over spontaneous generation. 



The works of Pasteur constitute one unbroken chain of 

 triumph. He was in his day pre-eminent in chemistry. In his 

 studies as to the cause of chemical changes during fermentation 

 he became convinced that certain living mirco-organisms, bacteria 

 and yeasts, were the true cau=e -that these changes, the products of 

 fermentation, w^'''^ '-aused by living substances ; that the different 

 kinds of fermentation products as lactic acid, buteric acid, alcohol, 



