Louis Pasteur

Louis Pasteur’s germ theory was a breakthrough in medicine. He then

went on to figure out how to prevent diseases by creating vaccines for

cholera, smallpox, anthrax and rabies, and by developing a food-

purification method called “pasteurization.”

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Back in the 1800s, people typically did not live long and healthy lives. Serious illness
was very common, and people often died young.
French chemistry professor Louis Pasteur and his wife had five children, and three of
them died in childhood of typhoid (a disease caused by drinking water tainted with
bacteria). Unlike most people who simply accepted that the death of children was
something that happened in most families, Pasteur made a vow to find out how illnesses
like this worked, and to find a way to stop them.
At that time, there was a big debate in the medical profession about where illnesses came
from: many people believed that “bad” particles just created themselves out of nowhere.
Pasteur helped prove once and for all that these particles - or germs - were carried in the
air and would grow and multiply where they landed.
His findings led to ideas that seemed revolutionary then, like doctors washing their hands
before operating on patients! His germ theory alone would make Pasteur a great figure in
science, but his work was only half done. Now that he had shown where diseases came
from, he set out to discover how to prevent the diseases, and cure them.
In the course of experimenting with chickens and deliberately giving them cholera,