Pasteur's life and work in relation to the advancement of medical science.

  • Stimson, Lewis Atterbury, 1844-1917.
Date:
1893
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Pasteur's life and work in relation to the advancement of medical science. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by the Augustus C. Long Health Sciences Library at Columbia University and Columbia University Libraries/Information Services, through the Medical Heritage Library. The original may be consulted at the the Augustus C. Long Health Sciences Library at Columbia University and Columbia University.

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    our honor, and our gratitude ; and there is a peculiar propriety in the public and professional recognition of our obligations to those who are not strictly of us. I of- fer no excuse, therefore, for asking your attention this evening to a brief review of the life and accomplishments of a man who is by profession a chemist and whose only medical title is that of honorary membership in an acade- my of medicine. And yet, although so widely removed from us by training and occupation, it has fallen to his lot^ in a larger measure, perhaps, than to that of any other man, to open important pathways of research in medicine and to establish a doctrine of causation of disease upon which a mighty and efficient structure of prevention and cure has already been erected. Upon principles discov- ered and established by him rests the modern treatment of surgical wounds, with the saving already effected of hundreds of thousands of lives, and to him a few years ago (1876) Prof, Tyndall wrote in these words : For the first time in the history of science we have the right to cherish the sure and certain hope that, in respect to epi- demic diseases, medicine will soon be delivered from em- piricism and placed on a really scientific basis. When that great day shall come, humanity, in my opinion, will recognize thatit is to you that the greatest part of its grati- tude is due. And at the meeting, last summer, of the Brit- ish Medical Association, the author of the address on bac- teriology expressed the gratitude of the world to him as the one whose genius had raised that branch of study to the rank of a science. Let us, then, add to-night our trib- ute of homage and gratitude to LOUIS PASTEUR. Born in December, 1822, in a village near the central eastern frontier of France, of humble parents who labored and sacrificed to advance his education as though they foresaw his future, we find him at the age of eighteen already a tutor in the college of Besangon, which had just given him his baccalaureate degree, with a reputation es-