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Updated: May 20, 2025
While Mary Baker Glover Patterson Eddy was finding her unhappy way through border-land regions into a cloudy light, Louis Pasteur, sitting, in the phrase of Huxley, "as humbly as a little child before the facts of life," was making those investigations in bacteriology which were to be, in some ways, the greatest contribution of the nineteenth century to the well-being of humanity.
Of course, the dairyman who takes pride enough in his work to produce such milk will sell nothing but what is first-class, and if he has business acumen he can always get more than the market price for his product. The talk about germs has been overdone, but no one can deny that the study of bacteriology has made people more careful about foods.
Advances made in our knowledge of how diseases are spread and controlled, particularly through recent studies in bacteriology and immunity, have made it possible to keep communicable diseases in absolute subjection. The marvel of the age is the lack of epidemic disease in the army to-day. This is particularly striking in view of our experiences in other recent wars.
It requires not only an understanding of bacteriology, but skilled workmanship and earnest attention to details. The secret processes of this company are known to a close group only, of which I am one.
This chapter will be devoted to considering how the study of bacteriology has contributed directly and indirectly to our power of combating disease. In the study of medicine in the past centuries the only aim has been to discover methods of curing disease; at the present time a large and increasing amount of study is devoted to the methods of preventing disease.
The influence of micro-organisms in the causation of disease, and the rôle played by them in interfering with the natural process of repair, are so important that the science of applied bacteriology has now come to dominate every department of surgery, and it is from the standpoint of bacteriology that nearly all surgical questions have to be considered.
King, Sanitary Commissioner of the Madras Presidency, is quoted as saying in a lecture : "The Institutes of Vishnu and the Laws of Manu fit in excellently with the bacteriology, parasitology and applied hygiene of the West. The hygiene of food and water, private and public conservancy, disease suppression and prevention, are all carefully dealt with."
The Pasteur Institute is in effect a school of bacteriology, where each of the professors is at once a teacher and a brilliant investigator. The chief courses of instruction consist of two series each year of lectures and laboratory demonstrations on topics within the field of bacteriology.
For instance, the study of bacteriology first led us to suspect, and then demonstrated, that tuberculosis is a contagious disease, and from the time that this was thus proved there has been a slow, but, it is hoped, a sure decline in this disease.
In short, the study of bacteriology has brought us into a condition where we are no longer helpless in the presence of a raging epidemic. We no longer sit in helpless dismay, as did our ancestors, when an epidemic enters a community, but, knowing their causes and sources, set about at once to remove them. As a result, severe epidemics are becoming comparatively short-lived.
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