Here comes Pasteur's great
work. Before him Egyptian darkness; with his advent a light that
brightens more and more as the years give us ever fuller knowledge. The
facts that fevers were catching, that epidemics spread, that infection
could remain attached to articles of clothing, etc., all gave support to
the view that the actual cause was something alive, a contagium vivum.
It was really a very old view, the germs of which may be found in the
Fathers, but which was first clearly expressed--so far as I know--by
Fracastorius, the Veronese physician, in the sixteenth century, who
spoke of the seeds of contagion passing from one person to another;(12)
and he first drew a parallel between the processes of contagion and
the fermentation of wine. This was more than one hundred years before
Kircher, Leeuwenhoek and others began to use the microscope and to see
animalcula, etc., in water, and so give a basis for the "infinitely
little" view of the nature of disease germs. And it was a study of the
processes of fermentation that led Pasteur to the sure ground on which
we now stand.
(12) Varro, in De Re Rustica, Bk. I, 12 (circa 40 B.C.), speaks
of minute organisms which the eye cannot see and which enter the
body and cause disease.
Pages:
249
250
251
252
253
254
255
256
257
258
259
260
261
262
263
264
265
266
267
268
269
270
271
272
273