Louis Pasteur

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Louis Pasteur
Louis Pasteur, French microbiologist and the
'father' of the germ theory of disease.
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Louis Pasteur
Louis Pasteur was born in a little village in
France in 1822. His father was a poor tanner, but
Louis soon showed himself to be a clever boy. His
father taught him to love God, and Louis always
wanted to serve other people.
One day his teacher let him look through his
microscope which make things look much bigger.
Louis was very excited to see every detail of
tiny insects and plants though the microscope.
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New Discoveries
Louis knew that he wanted to spend his life
finding out the world of nature. He worked very
hard at his science and by the time he was a man
he had become a professor at a college in
Paris. All through his life he studied hard,
making new discoveries.
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Germ Theory of Disease
Louis Pasteur discovered that germs cause
disease. He believed that they caused things like
food and drink to go bad, and brought sickness to
animals and men.
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Pasteurisation
Louis was studying wine and why wine went bad, no
one knew why. He found that the wine remained
good if the air, full of germs, was kept away
from it. He found too that heat killed the
germs. Milk is heated today to destroy germs. We
call it pasteurised milk which prevents it from
going sour by killing the germs and sealing it
from the air.  
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Silkworm
In 1865, Pasteur began to study the silkworm
diseases that were crippling the silk industry in
France. He discovered the infectious agents and
revealed the manner in which these agents are
transmitted and how to prevent them.
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Clean Hospitals
In 1873 something very sad happened when one of
Louis Pasteurs little daughters died from a
disease called typhoid. He mourned his daughter
but also decided to study the disease which
attacked animals and men.
He began to work in hospitals which were dreadful
places full of germs. He used disinfectants to
kill them and kept everything clean. After that,
very few people died in hospital.
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Vaccinations
Soon Louis was able to show that germs caused
disease in sheep. He noticed that once an animal
had a disease they never caught it again. He
decided it must have been that the dead germs in
blood saved the animals from new, living germs.
So if he put some harmless germs into the animals
blood it would never be attached by live germs.
Today we call this vaccination. This was a
wonderful discovery!
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Mad Dog
Louis knew his discovery must be used to save
people from suffering too, he had to prove it but
he dared not risk killing a human being.
He began to study dogs. In those days anyone
bitten by a mad dog died from the poison. Louis
knew he must get some of the poison to see if he
could find and kill the germs in it. A mad dog
was brought to him one day and he gathered the
poison into a tube ready to use.
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Saving Joseph
One day Louis chance came. A mother brought to
him her little boy Joseph who had been bitten
twelve times by a mad dog, and everyone knew he
would die. Is is too late? His mother wept.
Only God knows that, replied the great man. I
will do all I can. day after day he put the
harmless germs into the boy. Then he injected the
living germs. He had to wait seven days until the
boy jumped out of bed full of life!
By his hard work and faith Louis Pasteur had
given a great blessing to mankind.
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Pasteur Institute
Soon he was famous and the Pasteur Institute was
built in Paris to honour him. He worked there
till his death in 1895, always humble because of
his Christian faith. He had spent his life in the
service of God and Man.
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The Jubilee of Louis Pasteur (1822-95) at the
Sorbonne, 27th December 1892, from "Le Petit
Journal"