When Louis Pasteur was a boy of nine in the little French Village of Arbois, wolves used to come down from the Jura Mountains and often a villager would be mangled or killed. The only known cure for the poisonous bite of the wolf was the application of a white-hot iron to the wounds — a terrible treatment that made a lasting impression on the mind of young Louis. 

Louis’s father was a tanner and made much use of strong acids, so Louis became curious about them and decided to study chemistry when he was older. When he was fifteen he went off to Paris to school but, since he was homesick, his father sent him to the university at Besancon, which was not far from home. In 1842 he received his B.S. degree with, however, “Mediocre in Chemistry attached to his diploma. Nevertheless Louis was determined to become a scientist. 

He then went to Paris to teach and here he made the first of his remarkable experiments in chemistry — so beginning a long career of teaching and experimentation. Through investigating the causes of fermentation and discovering a way to save France’s wine and silkworm industries, he became France’s most famous scientist. But it was only after many years, during which he made some of his most important discoveries, that he got outside help — he had made all of his early discoveries in an attic lab with hardly any equipment at all. Finally in 1885, Louis Pasteur, who as a boy had seen people die from a wolf’s bite, inoculated a child against the bite of a mad dog and saved his life, thus proving his cure for the dread disease of hydrophobia. 

The story of Louis Pasteur by Alida Malkus is an inspiring account of the life of one of the world’s great scientific pathfinders, who made life safer for us all. 

From the dust jacket