Upon
those two memorable researches made by a country doctor rests the modern
science of bacteriology.
The next great advance was the discovery by Pasteur of the possibility
of so attenuating, or weakening, the poison that an animal inoculated
had a slight attack, recovered and was then protected against the
disease. More than eighty years had passed since on May 14, 1796, Jenner
had vaccinated a child with cowpox and proved that a slight attack of
one disease protected the body from a disease of an allied nature. An
occasion equally famous in the history of medicine was a day in 1881,
when Pasteur determined that a flock of sheep vaccinated with the
attenuated virus of anthrax remained well, when every one of the
unvaccinated infected from the same material had died. Meanwhile, from
Pasteur's researches on fermentation and spontaneous generation, a
transformation had been initiated in the practice of surgery, which,
it is not too much to say, has proved one of the greatest boons ever
conferred upon humanity. It had long been recognized that, now and
again, a wound healed without the formation of pus, that is, without
suppuration, but both spontaneous and operative wounds were almost
invariably associated with that process; and, moreover, they frequently
became putrid, as it was then called,--infected, as we should say,--the
general system became involved and the patient died of blood poisoning.
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