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Features Departments Information |
 Stanford T. Shulman, MD, Head, Division of Infectious Diseases of Children's Memorial Hospital, collects stamps with medical themes. As a regular feature editor of The Child's Doctor, Dr. Shulman provides some of his favorite and a brief commentary on them. |
Honoring Louis Pasteur STANFORD T. SHULMAN, MD aFall 2001 The centenary of the death of Louis Pasteur (1822–1895), the founder of the field of bacteriology, was honored on the two 1995 souvenir sheets shown here. Pasteur was born in Dôle in the French province of Jura and in 1847 graduated as a chemist from the Ecole Normale Superieure in Paris, a school to train young professors. After teaching chemistry and carrying out research studies in Dijon, Strasbourg, and Lille, he returned to Paris in 1857, spending his most productive years at the Sorbonne (1867–1889) and then as director of the Institut Pasteur (1889–1895).  Many of Pasteur's significant contributions to science and medicine are shown on these two sheets of stamps. The square piece from Madagascar (top left) shows a young Pasteur holding the specially designed flasks that he used in experiments which disproved the theory of spontaneous generation. At the top right, Pasteur holds a flask containing a dried rabbit spinal cord, used in the rabies virus attenuation process to prepare a suitable vaccine. At the bottom left, Pasteur examines another flask, while at the bottom right he—a non-physician!—inoculates, presumably with rabies vaccine, the lower abdominal wall of a remarkably stoic young man.  The Ghana souvenir sheet depicts five highlights of Pasteur's career. The left-most stamp shows the familiar dried rabbit spinal cord, while the next (yellow) stamp presents the rabies virus and a cartoon of Pasteur injecting a very large hypodermic syringe into an apparently rabid dog. The middle stamp credits Pasteur with discovery in 1880 of the pneumococcus (Streptococcus pneumoniae), which he termed "microbe septicemique du salive," although the organisms depicted more closely resemble group A streptococci. The fourth stamp commemorates Pasteur's identification of the vibrio responsible for chicken cholera and the development of a vaccine against this important veterinary disease. Finally, the stamp on the right honors Pasteur's rescue of the French brewing industry by characterizing the chemistry of the fermentation process and introducing the process of pasteurization (of course still used today, not only for beer) to prevent spoilage. |