Volume 42, Number 20 · December 21, 1995
The Pioneer Defended
By M.F. Perutz
The Private Science of Louis Pasteur
by Gerald L. Geison
Princeton University Press, 378 pp., $29.95
Louis Pasteur was the father of modern hygiene, public health, and much of modern medicine. He was born in 1822 at Dole, halfway between Dijon and Besançon in eastern France, where his father owned and ran a small tannery. He attended school in nearby Arbois, obtained his first science degrees in Besançon, and in 1847 graduated with a doctorate in science from the Ecole Normale Supérieure in Paris. Scientists at that time believed that the fermentation of grapes, or the souring of milk, or the putrefaction of meat, were all purely chemical processes unrelated to microorganisms.
Review, 4370 words
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