The biology of bacteria : an introduction to general microbiology / by Arthur T. Henrici.

  • Arthur Trautwein Henrici
Date:
[1934]
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: The biology of bacteria : an introduction to general microbiology / by Arthur T. Henrici. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    is put on a fresh wound, it occasions disease and death. It is obvious that these substances communicate their own state of putrefaction to the sound blood from which they were produced, exactly in the same manner as gluten in a state of decay or putrefaction causes a similar transformation in a solution of sugar.” This was important because there had already been some suggestions that perhaps mi¬ crobes had something to do with disease. The idea had been ex¬ pressed by the ancients, but first clearly formulated by the Viennese physician, Plenciz (1762). Observations of the contagiousness of cer¬ tain diseases, the ability to produce disease with minute quantities of infectious material, the apparently unlimited increase of this ma¬ terial in the diseased body, the incubation period before disease developed after exposure, and finally the specific differences in the symptoms of disease (to be explained by the occurrence of specific microbes for each disease) — all of these led to the view that such diseases were caused by an invisible living agent, a “contagium vivum.” This, then, was the stage set for Pasteur, the master mind who was to found modern microbiology: — Microbes (yeasts or bacteria) always appeared in fermenting or putrefying materials. Their rela¬ tionship to these reactions was not clear, but it seemed that the fermentation or putrefaction was a spontaneous chemical reaction and that the microbes were either a product of the reaction, or an unimportant by-phenomenon. Disease and putrefaction were looked upon as similar things, and there was a hint that microbes were related to disease also. Pasteur. In 1822, in the village Dole, in France, there was born Louis Pasteur, son of a tanner and ex-sergeant major in the army of Napoleon. Educated at the ficole Normale at Paris, he became fas¬ cinated by chemistry, and his earliest scientific work had to do with the structure of tartaric acid. The Journal of Infectious Diseases, an important American publication dealing with medical bacteriology, bears on its cover a picture of two crystals of tartaric acid, mirror images of each other, commemorating Pasteur’s first researches. It is important to remember that Pasteur was, first of all, a chemist. His training, his viewpoint, as a chemist, influenced profoundly his researches in microbiology, influenced indeed the whole subsequent development of the science. He, and the microbiologists who fol¬ lowed him, were much more interested in what microbes do than in
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