国外英文文学系列 The life of Pasteur.docx

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1、国外英文文学系列 The life of PasteurTitle: The life of PasteurAuthor: Ren Vallery-RadotINTRODUCTIONLhomme en ce sicle a pris une connaissance toute nouvelle des ressource de la nature et, par lapplication de son intelligence il a commenc les faire fructifier. Il a refait, par la gologie et la palontologie,

2、lhistoire de la terre, entra?ne elle-mme par la grande loi de lvolution. Il conna?t mieux, grace Pasteur surtout, les conditions dexistence de son propre organisme et peut entreprendre dy combattre les causes de destruction.Monod, LEurope Contemporaine.Whether to admire more the man or his method, t

3、he life or the work, I leave for the readers of this well-told story to decide. Among the researches that have made the name of Pasteur a household word in the civilised world, three are of the first importancea knowledge of the true nature of the processes in fermentationa knowledge of the chief ma

4、ladies which have scourged man and animalsa knowledge of the measures by which either the body may be protected against these diseases, or the poison neutralised when once within the body.I.Our knowledge of disease has advanced in a curiously uniform way. The objective features, the symptoms, natura

5、lly first attracted attention. The Greek physicians, Hippocrates, Galen, and Aretaeus, gave excellent accounts of many diseases; for example, the forms of malaria. They knew, too, very well, their modes of termination, and the art of prognosis was studied carefully. But of the actual causes of disea

6、se they knew little or nothing, and any glimmerings of truth were obscured in a cloud of theory. The treatment was haphazard, partly the outcome of experience, partly based upon false theories of the cause of the disease. This may be said to have been the sort of knowledge possessed by the professio

7、n untilvi men began to study the “seats and causes” of disease, and to search out the changes inside the body, corresponding to the outward symptoms and the external appearances. Morbid anatomy began to be studied, and in the hundred years from 1750 to 1850 such colossal strides were made that we kn

8、ew well the post-mortem appearances of the more common diseases; the recognition of which was greatly helped by a study of the relation of the pathological appearances with the signs and symptoms. The 19th century may be said to have given us an extraordinarily full knowledge of the changes which di

9、sease produces in the solids and fluids of the body. Great advances, too, were made in the treatment of disease. We learned to trust Nature more and drugs less; we got rid (in part) of treatment by theory, and we ceased to have a drug for every symptom. But much treatment was, and still is, irration

10、al, not based on a knowledge of the cause of the disease. In a blundering way many important advances were made, and even specifics were discoveredcinchona, for example, had cured malaria for a hundred and fifty years before Laveran found the cause. At the middle of the last century we did not know

11、much more of the actual causes of the great scourges of the race, the plagues, the fevers and the pestilences, than did the Greeks. Here comes in Pasteurs great work. Before him Egyptian darkness; with his advent a light that brightens more and more as the years give us ever fuller knowledge. The fa

12、cts that fevers were catching, that epidemics spread, that infection could remain attached to particles of clothing, etc., all gave support to the view that the actual cause was something alive, a contagium vivum. It was really a very old view, the germs of which may be found in the Fathers, but whi

13、ch was first clearly expressedso far as I knowby Frascastorius, a Veronese physician in the 16th century, who spoke of the seeds of contagion passing from one person to another; and he first drew a parallel between the processes of contagion and the fermentation of wine. This was more than one hundr

14、ed years before Kircher, Leeuwenhoek, and others, began to use the microscope and to seevii animalcul?, etc., in water, and so gave a basis for the “infinitely little” view of the nature of disease germs. And it was a study of the processes of fermentation that led Pasteur to the sure ground on whic

15、h we now stand. Starting as a pure chemist, and becoming interested in the science of crystallography, it was not until his life at Lille, a town with important brewing industries, that Pasteur became interested in the biological side of chemical problems. Many years before it had been noted by Cagn

16、iard-Latour that yeast was composed of cells capable of reproducing themselves by a sort of budding, and he made the keen suggestion that it was possibly through some effect of their vegetation that the sugar was transformed. But Liebigs view everywhere prevailed that the ferment was an alterable, o

17、rganic substance which exercised a catalytic force, transforming the sugar. It was in August, 1857, that Pasteur sent his famous paper on Lactic Acid Fermentation to the Lille Scientific Society; and in December of the same year he presented to the Academy of Sciences a paper on Alcoholic Fermentati

18、on, in which he concluded that the deduplication of sugar into alcohol and carbonic acid is correlevant to a phenomena of life. These studies had the signal effect of diverting the man from the course of his previous more strictly chemical studies. It is interesting to note how slowly these views di

19、slocated the dominant theories of Liebig. More than ten years after their announcement I remember that we had in our chemical lectures the catalytic theory very fully presented.Out of these researches arose a famous battle which kept Pasteur hard at work for four or five yearsthe struggle over spont

20、aneous generation. It was an old warfare, but the microscope had revealed a new world, and the experiments on fermentation had lent great weight to the omne vivum ex ovo doctrine. The famous Italians, Redi and Spallanzani, had led the way in their experiments, and the latter had reached the conclusi

21、on that there is no vegetable and no animal that has not its own germ. But heterogenesis became the burning question, and Pouchet in France, and Bastian in England,viii led the opposition to Pasteur. The many famous experiments carried conviction to the minds of scientific men, and destroyed for eve

22、r the old belief in spontaneous generation. All along the analogy between disease and fermentation must have been in Pasteurs mind; and then came the suggestion: “What would be most desirable would be to push those studies far enough to prepare the road for a serious research into the origin of vari

23、ous diseases.” If the changes in lactic, alcohol and butyric fermentations are due to minute living organisms, why should not the same tiny creatures make the changes which occur in the body in the putrid and suppurative diseases. With an accurate training as a chemist, having been diverted in his s

24、tudies upon fermentation into the realm of biology, and nourishing a strong conviction of the identity between putrefactive changes of the body and fermentation, Pasteur was well prepared to undertake investigations, which had hitherto been confined to physicians alone.The first outcome of the resea

25、rches of Pasteur upon fermentation and spontaneous generation represents a transformation in the practice of surgery, which, it is not too much to say, has been one of the greatest boons ever conferred upon humanity. It had long been recognised that now and again a wound healed without the formation

26、 of pus, that is without suppuration, but both spontaneous and operative wounds were almost invariably associated with that change; and, moreover, they frequently became putrid, as it was then calledinfected, as we should say; the general system became involved, and the patient died of blood poisoni

27、ng. So common was this, particularly in old, ill-equipped hospitals, that many surgeons feared to operate, and the general mortality in all surgical cases was very high. Believing that from outside the germs came which caused the decomposition of wounds, just as from the atmosphere the sugar solutio

28、n got the germs which caused the fermentation, a young surgeon at Glasgow, Joseph Lister, applied the principles of Pasteurs experiments to their treatment. It may be well here to quote from Listers original paper in the Lancet, 1867:“Turning now to the questionix how the atmosphere produces decompo

29、sition of organic substances, we find that a flood of light has been thrown upon this most important subject by the philosophic researches of M. Pasteur, who has demonstrated by thoroughly convincing evidence that it is not to its oxygen or to any of its gaseous constituents that the air owes this p

30、roperty, but to minute particles suspended in it, which are the germs of various low forms of life, long since revealed by the microscope, and regarded as merely accidental concomitants of putrescence, but now shown by Pasteur to be its essential cause, resolving the complex organic compounds into s

31、ubstances of simpler chemical constitution, just as the yeast plant converts sugar into alcohol and carbonic acid.” From these beginnings modern surgery took its rise, and the whole subject of wound infection, not only in relation to surgical diseases, but to child-bed fever, forms now one of the mo

32、st brilliant chapters in the history of Preventive Medicine.II.Pasteur was early impressed with the analogies between fermentation and putrefaction and the infectious diseases, and in 1863 he assured the French Emperor that his ambition was “to arrive at the knowledge of the causes of putrid and con

33、tagious diseases.” After a study upon the diseases of wines, which has had most important practical bearings, an opportunity came of the very first importance, which not only changed the whole course of his career, but had great influence in the development of medical science. A disease of the silkw

34、orm had, for some years, ruined one of the most important industries of France, and in 1865 the Government asked Pasteur to give up the laboratory work and teaching, and to devote his whole energies to the task of investigating it. The story of the brilliant success which followed years of applicati

35、on to the problem will be read with deep interest by every student of science. It was the first of his victories in the application of the experimental methods of a trained chemist to thex problems of biology, and it placed his name high in the group of the most illustrious benefactors of practical

36、industries.The national tragedy of 1870-2 nearly killed Pasteur. He had a terrible pilgrimage to make in search of his son, a sergeant in Bourbakis force. “The retreat from Moscow cannot have been worse than this,” said the savant. In October, 1868, he had had a stroke of paralysis, from which he re

37、covered in a most exceptional way, as it seemed to have diminished neither his enthusiasm nor his energy. In a series of studies on the diseases of beer, and on the mode of production of vinegar, he became more and more convinced that these studies on fermentation had given him the key to the nature

38、 of the infectious diseases. It is a remarkable fact that the distinguished English philosopher of the seventeenth century, the man who more than any one else of his century appreciated the importance of the experimental method, Robert Boyle, had said that he who could discover the nature of ferment

39、s and fermentation, would be more capable than anyone else of explaining the nature of certain diseases. The studies on spontaneous generation, and Listers application of the germ theory to the treatment of wounds, had aroused the greatest interest in the medical world, and Villemin, in a series of

40、most brilliant experiments, had demonstrated the infectivity of tuberculosis. An extraordinary opportunity now offered for the study of a widespread epidemic disease, known as anthrax, which in many parts of France killed from 25 to 30 per cent. of the sheep and cattle, and which in parts of Europe

41、had been pandemic, attacking both man and beast. As far back as 1838 minute rods had been noted in the blood of animals which had died from the disease; and in 1863 Devaine thought that these little bodies, which he called bacteridia, were the cause of the disease. In 1876 a young German district ph

42、ysician, Robert Koch, began a career, which in interest and importance rivals that of the subject of this memoir. Koch confirmed in every point the old researches of Devaine; but he did much more, and for the first time isolated the organism in pure culture outside the body, grew successive generati

43、ons, showed thexi remarkable spore formation, and produced the disease artificially in animals by inoculating with the cultures. Pasteur confirmed these results, and in the face of extraordinary opposition succeeded in convincing his opponents. Out of this study came a still more important discovery

44、, namely, that it was possible so to attenuate or weaken the virus or poison that the animal could be inoculated, and have a slight attack, recover, and be protected against the disease. More than eighty years had passed since, on May 14th, 1796, Jenner, with a small bit of virus taken from a cow-po

45、x on the hand of the milkmaid, Sarah Newlme, had vaccinated a child, and thus proved that a slight attack of one disease would protect the body from disease of a similar character. It was an occasion famous in the history of medicine, when, in the spring of 1881, at Melun, at the farmyard of Pouilly

46、 le Fort, the final test case was determined, and the flock of vaccinated sheep remained well, while every one of the unvaccinated, inoculated from the same material, had died. It was indeed a great triumph.The studies on chicken cholera, yellow fever, and on swine plague helped to further the gener

47、al acceptance of the germ theory. I well remember at the great meeting of the International Congress in 1881, the splendid reception accorded to the distinguished Frenchman, who divided with Virchow the honours of the meeting. Finally came the work upon one of the most dreaded of all diseaseshydroph

48、obia, an infection of a most remarkable character, the germ of which remains undiscovered. The practical results of Pasteurs researches have given us a prophylactic treatment of great efficacy. Before its introduction the only means of preventing the development of the disease was a thorough cauteri

49、sation of the disease wound within half an hour after its infliction. Pasteur showed that animals could be made immune to the poison, and devised a method by which the infection conveyed by the bite could be neutralised. Pasteur Institutes for the treatment of hydrophobia have been established in different countries, and where the disease is widely prevalent have been of the greatest benefit. Except at the London Congress, the only occasionxii on which I saw the great master was in 1891 or 1892,