Professional Documents
Culture Documents
History of Immunology
History of Immunology
Chinese experience
Smallpox.
To Turkey
VARIOLATION
In 1879 in France, Louis Pasteur was studying the bacterium that causes a
disease of chickens called fowl cholera. (The bacterium is now called
Pasteurella multocida.) Pasteur possessed a culture of this bacterium that,
when injected into chickens, consistently caused an infection that killed them.
One afternoon he told his assistant, Charles Chamberland, to infect some
birds with the culture. Since it was late in the day and he was about to go on
vacation, Chamberland decided to postpone the experiment until he
returned. As a result, the chickens eventually received an injection of the
bacterial culture that had remained on the bench for several weeks. The
inoculated chickens remained healthy. Pasteur then decided to inject these
chickens with a second dose of bacteria from a fresh bacterial culture. To
Pasteurs surprise, the birds survived this second dose without becoming ill.
Pasteur, with remarkable insight, recognized that this phenomenon was
identical in principle to vaccination. By injecting his chickens with the aged
culture of bacteria (a vaccine), he had protected them against disease caused
by a fresh culture of the same organism.
A few years later, the phenomenon of allergy was described and was shown
to be mediated by circulating antibodies