Imagine thousands of people dying in unsanitary conditions without medicine to help or prevent illness. If one person in your family got infected with a deadly disease, it was more than likely that your whole family would die. Picture people all around dying from smallpox, an almost unheard of disease in this day and age. Tragedies like this started to change after Edward Jenner’s work with cowpox pustules, and when Louis Pasteur proposed the germ theory which suggested that some diseases were caused by certain microbes. These discoveries (and theory) lead to the major contribution of vaccines and the reduction of deaths due to certain illnesses.
Edward Jenner was a country doctor in the 1770s. He lived in Berkeley, England and …show more content…
This link is known as the germ theory. Pasteur was studying these connections by injecting chickens with chicken cholera bacteria and trying to find the site of the infection. During this experiment, Pasteur asked his assistant to inject a batch of chickens with a fresh sample of the chicken cholera bacteria. The assistant forgot and went on vacation. When Pasteur’s assistant returned a month later, he injected the chickens with the left out bacteria and the chickens survived. Pasteur then injected the same chickens with a fresh sample of chicken cholera and the chickens did not get sick. Therefore the chickens developed an immunity to the bacteria. From this experiment, Pasteur is credited with the first laboratory developed vaccine. Since veterinarians in Paris were becoming concerned about the number of rabid dogs running wild in the streets, Louis Pasteur performed a study on rabies. Pasteur took samples from dead dogs and injected other animals with rabies. Then he tried to determine the site and cause of the infection so he could find a treatment or develop a vaccine. Pasteur was successful in developing a vaccine in 1885 and opened an institute is Paris to treat