The warmly human story of one of the world's great scientists whose patient experiments and painstaking research contributed vastly to modern medicine, surgical practice and industry.

In the early years of his work, medical men ridiculed his germ and microbe theories. They were affronted by the assertions of a "mere chemist". But wine-growers, brewers, silkworm growers and vinegar makers knew that his techniques had added millions of francs to their yearly incomes.

His work with anthrax, rabies, his developments of vaccines, and his pasteurization process are each dramatic episodes in a career devoted to the benefit of mankind. He lived to see his doctrines accepted and bear fruit through the work of other men who, following his theories, developed antitoxins for diptheria and snakebite and discovered the plague bacillus.

Honored by Emperor Napoleon III and the Empress Eugenie, by the Academy of Sciences and of Medicine and awarded the Cross of the Legion of Honor, Pasteur with all his successes was a humble man, his only ambition and one which he achieved beyond the hopes of most men—"to contribute in some way to the progress and to the good of humanity."

From the dust jacket