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  • Essay / Louis Pasteur, the revolutionary figure of medicine

    Louis Pasteur is the most influential in terms of understanding disease of the entire era because he is truly a giant of medicine. He was born on December 27, 1822 and died on September 28, 1895. He was a revolutionary chemist and microbiologist. His work led to unprecedented progress in science and medicine, to the point where 30 institutions and numerous streets, hospitals and schools bear his name and honor. He began his career at the royal college of Besançon where he obtained a degree in science. From there, he joined a normal school where he obtained both his master's degree in science and his doctorate in the same field. Shortly after, he became a university chemistry professor. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on “Why violent video games should not be banned”?Get the original essay His first contribution to science was molecular asymmetry. Unfortunately, this discovery has nothing to do with the subject explored in the book. But this fascinating discovery was based on the fact that chemical compounds reacted differently to polarized light depending on the different shapes of the compound's crystals and tended to be asymmetrical. This is a fascinating but complex discovery that would take too long to explain, but it is highly recommended to research it. Dr. Pasteur's first discovery related to disease prevention was the germ theory of fermentation. He made this astonishing discovery while working as an academic chemist at the Dean's Faculty of Science, thanks to requests from local brewers to help them solve problems related to alcohol production at the local distillery. Thanks to them, he began in-depth research on alcoholic fermentation. This led him to make an astonishing discovery that would lead him to study lactic acid in milk and the fermentation of certain acids, mainly butyric acid. Thanks to them, he left for Paris in 1857 both to become director of the Ecole Normale Supérieure but above all to present a new theory. He presented scientific evidence on how fragmentation occurs through microorganisms and each liquid can ferment by having a specific using the examples of alcohol, milk and acids. With this evidence, the germ theory of fermentation gained rapid acceptance in the scientific community. However, these discoveries will not stop there as Pasteur will delve deeper into the process that makes things ferment. In this research, he discovered that the specific organisms that carried out fermentation could only function in the absence of oxygen. It was with this in mind that he created two terms anaerobic and aerobic to classify organisms capable of functioning with oxygen (aerobic) and organisms that could only live in the absence of oxygen (anaerobic) . With this knowledge, Pasteur would suggest that deterioration and putrefaction were caused by these anaerobic microorganisms. Thanks to these discoveries, it would firstly protect the French alcohol industry from contamination and prevent it from spreading diseases linked to wine contamination. Later, French Emperor Napoleon III asked him to further study alcohol contamination. Here he would discover a process used even today. While studying the contamination of wine, he realized that germs were responsible for the contamination. Then he decided to avoid further contamination of the wine by heating the wine to between 55 and 60 Celsius or 130-140 Fahrenheit and then cooling it quickly. He did this because he now understood thatbacteria could not survive such rapid change. This process is called pasteurization. Even today it is used in almost all liquids intended for human consumption, which prevents the spread of pathogens through these liquids, causing infections linked to these pathogens which nowadays are almost extinct thanks to these processes. After these immense successes, Louis Pasteur will try to proveThe theory of the spontaneous generation of putrefaction and fermentation is erroneous. This theory asserted that these two processes occurred spontaneously and could not be avoided. Pasteur decided that as long as such a theory existed, the progress of science would be hampered by unnecessary debates on the subject between naturalists and the scientific community. To solve the problem he would carry out a simple experiment: he would place a piece of beef broth in a bottle with a long neck which would trap the contaminated particles before reaching the main part of the bottle, he would then heat the flask containing the broth in order to sterilize it. THE. Then he would break the neck of the bottle, and as it was exposed to air and the normal environment, it would eventually show signs of bacterial contamination, thus showing that if the neck of the bottle was never broken, it would would not happen. These settled the dispute because it was clear that there was no such thing as spontaneous generation. These findings had many implications. First, they settled a 200-year-old dispute between naturalists and scientific researchers, and second, they marked the beginning of a peak in the use of pasteurization by both local populations. and industries nationwide to increase the safe consumption of their products. Third, it solidifies the claims of the science of bacteriology that microorganisms were responsible for multiple processes. However, Pasteur would make other discoveries that would help medicine. After this discovery, Pasteur's fame increased greatly, leading silkworm breeders and a former professor and friend to call for his help during the silkworm crisis. This crisis consisted of a mysterious disease that caused eggs or silkworms to die before producing silk, these had spread throughout Europe which was on the verge of bankruptcy. Although he knew nothing about silkworms, he accepted the call for help to learn more about infectious diseases. He will devote the next 5 years of his life to this investigation. He first noticed that disease could start with a mature month laying diseased eggs, he suggested farmers check each month who was laying eggs for a specific globule in the blood or skin that he associated with disease and if the butterfly had globules. the eggs she had laid had to be destroyed as soon as possible. However, this didn't work, healthy butterflies still produced diseased eggs. Faced with such an error, he immediately got back to work to find a solution. He found diseased worms without globules and healthy worms with globules. After months and months of research, he discovered that there was a second disease with a different globule, and with this knowledge he was able to destroy the butterfly disease. But more importantly, he discovered how this globule could be transmitted to a healthy worm from a diseased worm if they ate from the same leaves and the second disease was transmitted through the worms' intestines. Likewise, how the disease was able to survive thanks to the atmospheric conditions of the worm's habitat. Thanks to this, not only precautions were taken in the breeding of livestock, but also more hygiene andconsideration have been adopted by humans to prevent the spread of disease, such as washing clothes and not consuming the same food that another person was consuming. It was also this affair that pushed Pasteur to devote himself so much to the understanding of infectious diseases and their treatment. Additionally, these experiments and fermentation experiments are often mentioned as inspiration for the germ theory of disease. The germ theory was very similar to the germ theory of fermentation, it essentially stated that every disease was linked to a microorganism that caused the disease process. However, in the early 1970s, while Pasteur was an associate member of the Academy of Medicine, the academy rejected his germ theory in favor of miasma theory or other more idealistic alternatives than Pasteur's theory, basically because it came from a chemical perspective, which many doctors disagree with. with the back from the 19th century. However, Pasteur would prove his theory not by deviating with the members but by creating an innovation still used today. It would create one of the first effective vaccines on record. His first vaccine would be against a disease known as chicken cholera. This discovery was made by observing how the laboratory created cultures of the disease-causing microorganism, which lost their toughness but retained the reduced characteristics of the disease over several generations. Then he injected chickens with the now weaker form of the disease and then injected them with the natural form of the disease and showed how they were fully immune. This showed how correct the germ theory was, because it demonstrated that if the specific microorganism was unable to survive in the body (in this case, thanks to chicken immunity), the disease would not be present nor its symptoms. After that he worked on anthrax. At the same time, Robert Koch had discovered and isolated the anthrax bacillus (the cause of anthrax infection) and announced the life cycle of the disease. Pasteur confirmed these findings as the truth. After this, he would provide proof that the bacillus was entirely responsible for the disease, by injecting it into healthy sheep and observing how the disease was contracted and how symptoms appeared in previously healthy sheep and observing how all the sick sheep had the bacillus in their bodies. These, combined with other evidence provided by Koch on the life cycle of anthrax, forced medicine to accept the germ theory of disease and abandon the miasma theory of disease. The science of medical microbiology was born. Furthermore, to remove any doubt that the germ theory was wrong, he began work on an anthrax vaccine. He would first determine what was weakening the virus to make it less severe. Then, thanks to financial support from farmers, 70 to 80 farm animals were immunized against the disease. Then, Pasteur took the immunized sheep and the normal sheep to inject them with the natural form of the bacillus. After 2 weeks, all normal sheep had died while all vaccinated sheep were perfectly healthy and no anthrax symptoms had appeared. This was the final proof that disease was indeed caused by a specific microorganism and that vaccines were an effective means of immunization (despite the belief of some parents' unions and modern politicians). After that, Pasteur devoted part of his life to researching the origin of these microorganisms, making him the pioneer of pathology. His research in this area is,.