Louis Pasteur
Louis Pasteur
A small boy stood before the smithy and watched with awe and pity the terrible scene that went on inside. A man, who had been bitten by a mad dog, had been brought to the blacksmith. The blacksmith heated an iron rod, until it was red hot. As his assistants held the man down firmly, he plunged it into the wound caused by the mad dog. The man screamed with pain, until he became too exhausted to even groan.
The year was 1831 and the boy was Louis Pasteur, the son of Jean Joseph Pasteur, a local tanner. What he saw in the smithy was the only treatment then known for the bite of a diseased dog, which resulted in a fatal disease called rabies. Half a century later, this boy was to become a great scientist and find a cure for this deadly disease.
Rabies is a disease that is contracted and spread by dogs, wolves, foxes, and even bats, but mostly by dogs. The sick dogs become mad and run about biting everyone within their reach. The disease spreads from the dogs to other animals and human beings. If left untreated, all of them would die a very horrible death.
Before Pasteur discovered the cause of the disease and the cure, the treatment consisted of cauterising or burning the wound with a red hot iron. The burning never cured the disease, but only added to the agony of the sufferer.
Louis Pasteur was born in 1822 in the French village of Dole. There was nothing special about the boy Louis and nobody, who knew him, could have predicted that he would one day become famous and be remembered with gratitude all over the world.
But, as a young man, he took great interest in physics and chemistry. He was able to gain a thorough knowledge of these subjects and later, became a professor of chemistry at Lille, a town in a famous wine-growing region. It was here that he started the work that finally led him to the discoveries, from which mankind has benefited so much.
He proved that souring of wine, milk, and butter was caused by small living organisms known as germs or microbes. These germs cannot be seen by the naked eye, but only under a microscope. He also showed that these germs could be destroyed by heating, a method that is still used for preserving milk. This finding led him to the conclusion that most of the diseases of men, animals, and plants were caused by harmful microbes.
At this time, disaster struck the silk industry in France. Silkworms died from thousands of unknown diseases. The livelihood of the families that produced silk was threatened. Pasteur studied the problem and discovered that this disease, too, was due to harmful germs. He was able to teach the growers how to avoid the contagion.
His next discovery was the one that finally enabled him to win the battle against rabies. He conducted a series of experiments, for which he grew colonies (cultures) of cholera germs, which he injected into healthy chickens. The chickens sickened and died. This was yet another proof of his theory that harmful microbes were responsible for diseases.
Encouraged by these results, he next turned his attention to rabies. His first aim was to find out where the microbes causing the disease were. He suspected that they were in the saliva of the mad dogs, since it was their bite that produced the disease in man.
To make sure of this, he had to collect the saliva from sick dogs. This was a dangerous task. Two sturdy men would lasso a sick dog, stretch the struggling animal on a bench and hold it down. Pasteur would then insert a glass tube between the dog’s lips and extract a little of its saliva. It was their heroism and dedication that made them take such risks. A single bite from the dog could have proved fatal to any one of them.
He then injected this saliva into healthy dogs. But, here he was up against a difficulty. Sometimes, the disease takes many months to develop and until then, the affected animal appears to be normal. Whenever this happened, he had to wait several months to see if the injection would produce rabies in the dogs.
He overcame this difficulty by injecting the saliva directly into the brain of the dog, because it was the brain of the animal that the microbes attacked. By doing this, he succeeded in producing the disease in a healthy dog in two weeks. The next step was to see if he could protect healthy animals from the disease by injecting weakened rabies microbes. If this method could work in the case of cholera, it should work here, too.
He then introduced the disease in a rabbit by injecting the microbe-carrying saliva into its brain. After it died, he removed a bit of its brain and kept it in a sterilised bottle for fourteen days, by which time the microbes in it became weak. He then powdered this piece of brain, mixed it with water, and injected it into some healthy dogs.
The next day, he injected them with the brain matter that had been kept only for thirteen days and so on. He thus went on injecting into them, stage by stage, the powder containing more and more of the microbes.
Lastly, he gave them an injection of the substance that had been kept only one day for weakening.
At the end of the experiment, which lasted for fourteen days, he allowed his dogs to be bitten by rabid dogs. He was excited to find that the dogs could easily resist the disease.
The method had now to be tested on human beings. For this, he chose a boy named Joseph Meister, who had been repeatedly bitten by a mad dog. The wounds on his body were so numerous that they could not be cauterised.
He gave the injections the same way he gave them to the dogs. He gave ten of them and every time, he increased the virulence of the dose. The boy did not get the disease and happily returned to his village.
His next patient was a boy named Jubilee, who had been badly bitten while he was bravely trying to protect his friends from a ferocious mad dog. Pasteur repeated this treatment and cured Jubilee in a few days.
The news of Pasteur’s wonderful discovery spread all over the world. People started coming to him not only from different parts of France, but also from distant countries like America. Honours were showered upon him and he came to be known as one of the greatest sons of France.
Questions:
- What incident moved him to pity?
- What was the ancient cure for dog bites?
- What was his discovery?
- Describe Louis Pasteur’s service to mankind?
[Source – Stories for Children – II, Published by – Sri Sathya Sai Books & Publications Trust, Prashanti Nilayam]