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Chapter 10 : Victory Over Disease
The year 1877 constitutes a landmark in the life of Louis Pasteur and in the history of medicine. That April Pasteur published the first of his studies on anthrax—a disease of farm animals and humans—and this paper bears to the germ theory of disease the same relation that his 1857 paper on lactic acid bears to the germ theory of fermentation. While it is true that the germ theory of disease was accepted in medical circles only after 1877, the ground for acceptance had been prepared by many centuries of solid observations and shrewd thinking. Awareness of these facts led very early to the concept that certain diseases can be transmitted from one person to the next by contact, or can be caused by something present in the air. The potato blight is also important in the history of science because it contributed much to the understanding of disease causation. Pasteur had never heard of the invasion of the Irish potato fields by the fungus Phytophthora infestans, and this is unfortunate because he would have grasped the broad significance of the phenomenon for human and veterinary medicine. In the course of his studies on spontaneous generation, he wrote "It would be interesting to carry out frequent microscopic analysis of the dust floating in the air at the different seasons, and in different localities. The understanding of the phenomena of contagion, especially during the periods of epidemic diseases, would have much to gain from such studies.’’