LOUIS PASTEUR’S WORK.

Otago Daily Times, Issue 19069, 15 January 1924, Page 8

LOUIS PASTEUR’S WORK.

BENEFACTOR TO MANKIND. SAVED A MILLION LIVES. In “Paradise and the Peri,” Thomas Moore tolls how a banished angel found her way back into heaven. She was to be readmitted, provided she brought back the gift heaven valued the highest. The Peri offered a lover’s sigh, the gatds remained closed. Again she journeyed to the far-off earth and returned with a drop of blood shed by a youth in his country’s defence, but even this red sign of heroism failed to open the gates. A third time the Peri returned with a tear from the eyes of a sorrowful sinner, and this symbol of repentance proved to bo earth’s greatest gift to heaven. Now, suppose a human being, banished by society, were told that the only way he could re-enter the human fold would be to discover, among the records of the races, the name of mankind's greatest benefactor, would it be possible to find a nam© more. likely to open human hearts than that of Louis Pasteur? Throughout the civilised world, schools and scientific societies are now celebrating his centenary. Another Frenchman, more widely known than Pasteur, cost France a million lives, and that is only a part of file cost chargeable to Napoleon; for it is said that due to the Napoleonic wars, the average stature of Frenchmen has been lowered four inches. Louis Pasteur, on the other hand, has saved a million lives, and as a result of his work: “In the last halfcentury the average span of life has increased 15 years, the infant mortality rate has been reduced one-third, and the deaths from typhoid have been reduced four-fifths.” Prior to Pasteur’s time everybody believed germs originated spontaneously in stagnant water and decaying carcases. Pasteur moved that stagnation and decaf do not produce germs, but that germs, carried in the air, produce the stagnation and decay. He took impure water, purified it by boiling, corkod a sample in a dottle, and it remained pure. Another sample, corked with wool-cotton (which- admitted the air but filtered out the germs), also remained pure. But a third sample. left exposed to the air, became scummy with germs. Then he told the wine producers, brewers, and dairymen of Franco that if their products were first sterilised and then sealed in airtight containers thev would remain pure. All the bottling and canning industries of the world have grown out of this discovery. Mothers have Pasteur to thank for pasteurised milk. Pasteur discovered that the kind of germa carried in the saliva around a mad dog’s teeth causes rabies in human beings, and he produced a serum culture which_ completely cures the patient, if taken in time _ When the cattle, sheep, and hogs of his country became afflicted with deadly disease (anthrax) Pasteur found that the germs of the contagion were carried by peculiar worms. Then he did a very brilliant thing; he heated cultures of these germs, destroying their vitality without killing them, and treated the animate with these weakened germs, thereby rendering them immune to attack by the vigorous germs. That weakened germ culture is called vaccine. In like manner, when the silk industry became imperilled by germs in the silkworms, he discovered the cause and a cure. It is said that if France had lost her herds and silkworms she could not have paid the German indemnity after the Franco-Pru»* sian War. Germs are mankind’s most terrible enemies; they lurk unseen and multiply amazingly in the air we breathe, the water wo drink, and the food we eat. Pasteur located these enemies and taught us how to fight them effectively. Before his time our doctors were little better than medicine men; they are generate now commanding armies of benign germs with which disease germs are destroyed.