Revolution in Medicine

 

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Edward Jenner

 

 

In the eighteenth century, before Jenner, smallpox was a killer disease, as widespread as cancer or heart disease in the twentieth century but with the difference that the majority of its victims were babies and children.

 

Edward Jenner (17.5.1749 - 26.1.1823):

 

After school in London and a period as an army surgeon, Jenner spent his whole life as a country doctor in his native county of Gloucestershire in the West of England. His research was based on careful case-studies and clinical observation more than a hundred years before scientists could explain the viruses themselves. He injected the weaker form of the virus, namely the cow-pox virus, and through this the human body became resistant against the “real thing” without the danger of dying. His innovation was so successful that by 1840 the British government had banned alternative preventive treatments against smallpox.

"Vaccination", the word Jenner invented for his treatment (from the Latin vacca= cow), was adopted by Louis Pasteur for immunisation against any disease.

In 1980, as a result of Jenner's discovery, the World Health Assembly officially declared "the world and its peoples" free from smallpox. The year 1996 marked the two hundredth anniversary of Edward Jenner's first experimental vaccination which was the cure for the in most cases deadly smallpox virus.

 

Louis Pasteur

 

 

Louis Pasteur was born December 27, 1822 in Dôle, a region of Jura. Known worldwide as the man whose discoveries most changed medicine, Pasteur finished the “Ecole Normale Superieure” in Paris. Several years later, Pasteur served as a professor of chemistry at the Lille Faculty of Sciences (which he organized in 1854) and director of scientific studies at Ecole Normale.

Louis Pasteur was the first who described the scientific basis of fermentation, or more specifically, of how wine and beer are produced. Not taken seriously by doctors and scientists, Pasteur documented in great detail the method which allowed sugar to turn into alcohol through yeast. Studying the transformation over several years, Pasteur finally concluded that each type of fermentation was caused by a specific kind of bacteria. This discovery would lead Pasteur to become the founder of microbiological sciences and the first person who defined the word "germ" (=Keim).

By identifying individual microbes that were present in the human body during illness, Pasteur was able to find a way of protecting people against the risks of germs and viruses. Pasteur recognised exactly the cause of many contagious diseases of the late 1800's and then, developed vaccines to treat and prevent them. He found vaccinations for Diphtheria, Tetanus, Anthrax, Chicken Cholera, Silkworm Disease, Tuberculosis, Rabies and Plague.

Louis Pasteur is also well known for the invention of pasteurization, a process by which harmful bacteria in food products are destroyed using heat, but leaving the original product unharmed. Once the principles of sterilization were born, Pasteur spent much of his time working with local hospitals and doctors, supporting the discovery of new ways to sterilize equipment, environments and eliminate the spread of disease.

Louis Pasteur died on the 28th of September in 1895 as a cause of a heart-attack.

 

Anton K. and Emanuel H.

 

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