Boiling it down
Neil Matthews
The Redhill Academy
Summarising text
The work of Louis Pasteur
Louis Pasteur was born in 1822 France. His discovery of germs
transformed medicine for ever.
Pasteur is very important for three reasons:
• he showed that airborne microbes were the cause of disease
• he developed more vaccines
• he challenged old ideas that were incorrect and encouraged
others to do the same
In the 1850s, Pasteur was asked by a brewer (Monsieur Bigo) to find out why vats of beer
were turning sour and had to be thrown away. Using a microscope, Pasteur found thousands
of tiny micro-organisms in the beer and became convinced that they were responsible for
the beer going sour. Pasteur believed that they caused the beer to go off – they did not
appear because the beer was going sour (spontaneous generation). He studied other liquids
such as milk, wine and vinegar and concluded the liquids were being contaminated with
microbes that floated in the air. Most of the other people in medicine laughed at him.
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Apply it to a question
Who made the most important contribution to
the fight against infectious disease, Edward
Jenner or Louis Pasteur? (8 marks)