This Day in History: 1822-12-27

Louis Pasteur born this day in 1822. Perhaps the best known physician and scientist of the 19th century, Pasteur’s germ theory of disease has become the foundation of modern medicine and public health. His name lives on in everyday items such as “pasteurized” milk; his contributions also included vaccines for rabies and anthrax, as well as controls for industrial scale fermentation for food and medicine. He was a deeply motivated humanitarian, and once said: “Two contrary laws seem to be wrestling with each other nowadays; the one, a law of blood and death, ever imagining new means of destruction and forcing nations to be constantly ready for the battlefield — The other a law of peace, work and health, ever evolving new means of delivering man from the scourges which beset him.”