Germ Theory of Disease

Originally published in “The Outside World” A General History for Standard VI., The last hundred years have seen great progress in the fight against disease. Half a century before laughing gas was made of use to ease pain, it had been discovered by SIR HUMPHRY DAVY, but his discovery had not been practically applied. The successful introduction of anaesthetics for …

Robert Koch was a German physician and microbiologist. Today Google celebrated Robert Koch, one day prior to his 174th birthday, with a custom “doodle” on the Google home page: Koch won the Nobel Prize in 1905. There is a long standing controversy between the work of Koch and Louis Pasteur regarding the discovery of germ theory.  

Originally published in Science magazine, Vol. 16, No. 388 (Jul. 11, 1890), pp. 23-25 IT is now five years since M. Pasteur introduced to the medical world his alleged cure for hydrophobia. If his much-vaunted discovery possesses all the merits which have been claimed for it, he has earned a fair title to the gratitude of mankind. If, on the …

Originally published April 10, 2012 by the US National Library of Medicine INTRODUCTION As a student of immunology, I learned that Louis Pasteur was really the father of immunology, despite Edward Jenner’s pioneering introduction of vaccination to prevent smallpox in 1798 (Smith, 2011). Although successful, Jenner’s experiments led to no understanding as to how immunity develops. By comparison, in addition …

Originally published in The British Medical Journal, Vol. 1, No. 1366 (Mar. 5, 1887), pp. 532-534 At a recent meeting of the Académie de Médecine, M. Grancher replied, int he name of M. Pasteur, to the allegations of M. Peter respecting hte death of a patient suffering from hydrophobia. The patient in question had received nineteen inoculations, and not thirty-six, …

Originally published online by with Richar G Fiddian-Green on CMAJ: Canadian Medical Association Journal, September 3, 2004 The Germ Theory was formulated by Louis Pasteur along with Robert Koch. The Germ Theory of disease states that “a specific disease is caused by a specific type of microorganism.” The theory gained strong support from the Viennese obstetrician, Dr. Ignac Semmelweis, who …

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 …

This article was originally published in the Pharmaceutical Journal and Transactions, April 7, 1877, pp. 827-828 REVIEW On Fermentation. By P. Schützenberger (Director at the Chemical Laboratory at the Sorbonne). H.S. King and Co. London: 1876 This work forms the 20th volume of the International Scientific Series, and as might be expected from the pen of the author, it constitutes …

This article was originally published in the Pharmaceutical Journal and Transactions, August 4, 1877, pp. 89-90 The hope that, for once, a dispute between scientific men on a point of fact might be settle rationally, and that it would be conclusively ascertained whether Dr. Bastian was right in affirming, or M. Pasteur in denying, that bacterial will swarm in previously …