In spite of naysayers, Pasteur persisted and changed our world

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Pasteur was born in 1822. His start in life was less than spectacular. He was a mediocre student in elementary school. His teachers rated him only so-so. As a child, however, he developed passions for reading and also looking at and seeing things that were sometimes almost too small to see. Little by little he learned how to plough ahead, over and around the obstacles that appeared in his path, steadily increasing knowledge and accomplishment.

Pasteur was one of those innovators who was not always sure why he wanted to try a different approach to solving a problem. New paths seemed to open up naturally in his inventive mind; he refused to acknowledge that certain things were impossible to do.

Just looking at something was not enough for Louis Pasteur. He went beyond observation to digesting objects in all their aspects before he was satisfied. He was not only unafraid of trying something novel or strange, he thrived on such ways of living and thinking and doing.

Pasteur lived the ideal life of a scientist, observing, analyzing and tackling problems. He identified causes and proposed solutions. He perceived connections between problems that led him to novel solutions. He observed, and generated new ideas. He realized that prevention is preferable to cure. (Vaccination!)

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Louis Pasteur lived in difficult times. Life expectancy was low; many people died young. Many people were attacked by violent sicknesses, and doctors were often unable to treat such diseases successfully. The death rate of patients in hospitals was enormously high, sometimes reaching 85 percent of the patient population, and averaging between 60 and 75 percent. Infections spread wildly, and doctors did not know why, or how to prevent that spread. (These numbers seem almost unbelievable for us in the 21st century.)

Doctors then were convinced that diseases were caused by spontaneous generation of germs. When Louis Pasteur first proposed that germs were rampant in the air that people breathed, and that diseases were transmitted by inhaling air, or by physical contact, he was derided by doctors as a know-nothing. Doctors told him he was not a doctor, merely a chemist, so he could not claim the knowledge that doctors possessed.

Pasteur was beaten up in the press, scientific and other. His "Germ Theory of Disease" was ridiculed. It is difficult now to understand how locked into a particular mindset the medical profession was at that time, when they simply refused to entertain any new ideas.

Challenging him was Pierre Pachet, professor of physiology at Toulouse University. In 1872, with the disdain typically felt for Pasteur by the medical profession (i.e., because he was not a medical doctor, how dared he express such blatantly absurd theories?), Pachet declared, "Louis Pasteur’s theory of germs is ridiculous fiction."

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One reason Pasteur was so motivated to set out to prove his contention, however, was the fact that he had suffered the deaths of his three young daughters due to typhoid fever. His experiments showed that the microorganisms which caused disease came from afflicted people and floated around in the air. When they landed on a person, they were ingested into that person’s body, incubating there until symptoms of a disease manifested.

Pasteur’s experiments were imaginatively designed and well carried out. The evidence was conclusive, but the rigidly critical and superstitious beliefs of most doctors of the time made it difficult for them to be accepted. When Pasteur finally demonstrated conclusively that diseases were transmitted in hospitals by contact, dirty bed linen, clothes and even human contact with air exhaled by diseased persons, he radically altered hospitals and the medical profession.

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Dr. Joseph Lister heard Pasteur, and believed that his work had merit and that he was right. So, in his hospital in Glasgow, Scotland, Dr. Lister created a system for sterilizing instruments between uses, replacing dirty bandages, and instituting strict rules calling for surgeons to wash their hands before and between surgeries, as well as careful cleanup of accumulated filth in hospital beds, rooms and operating rooms.

After just a single year of Lister’s preventative procedures, the death rate among his hospital patients declined dramatically, from more than 50 percent to less than 15 percent. Lister thanked Pasteur for saving so many lives and for helping to change attitudes among his surgeons and physicians. As a result of Lister’s work, hospitals generally began to wash bed linens and bed clothes, and doctors and nurses began to "clean up" between treating patients. These practices led to a spectacular decline in the number of infectious diseases in hospitals.

Once it was established that germs spread though the air and by contact between people, work began in earnest to identify the specific microorganisms that spread different diseases. At the age of 40, Pasteur found his genius recognized. He was elected to the French Academy of Sciences.

(More to come.)