L'Institut Pasteur: contributions à son histoire

razzmatazz quackery hardly developed before the rapid expansion of commerce, advertising, communications and the press after the 1740s. Benes also shows that, at least up to the War of Independence, many of the showbiz-style quacks were paying brief visits to Europe, including the pioneer electro-therapist and sex-therapist, James Graham. In one final way, this volume documents the different course taken by New World medicine, by exploring the intimate links between healing, holiness-and business! American religious sects, it is well known, continually begat new medical doctrines, including the powerful Thomsonian movement. What is less well known, though intriguingly revealed in two absorbing papers on the Shakers (David Richards' 'Medicine and healing among the Maine Shakers, 1784-1854', and Margaret Moody Stier's 'Blood, sweat and herbs: health and medicine at the Harvard Shaker community, 1820-1855') is the development of the manufacture and sale of medicinal herbs as an early form of highly profitable agri-business. Now that pre-industrial community healing practices are being better understood, it is time that their comparative history was more fully explored, so that common elements and local diversities can be appreciated. It is on the basis of admirable collections of research papers like Medicine and healing that it will soon be possible to investigate such parallels. The book consists of 19 chapters, divided in 3 parts. The first part (chs. 1-6), 'De Pasteur a l'Institut Pasteur', deals with classic topics about Louis Pasteur and his Institute, a centre originally conceived for teaching and for research into infectious diseases. The second (chs. 7-13), 'Succes et limites de la recherche pasteurienne', covers the scientific highlights from microbiology and immunology (Duclaux, Roux, Ramon, Metchnikoff, Oudin, etc.) up to the establishment of the French School of molecular biology (Wollman, Jacob, Monod, and Lwoff). Perhaps the most exciting event at this meeting was the round table encouraged by the Nobel Prize winner Daniel Bovet on the history of the discovery of sulfamides by Jacques and Therese Trefouel, Federico Nitti and Bovet himself ('Le laboratoire de chimie therapeutique, de l'arsenic aux sulfamides'). The last part (chs. 14-19), 'Les prolongements de l'oeuvre pasteurienne dans le tiers monde', puts the emphasis on overseas colonial branches of the Institute (Australia, China, Africa, Rio de Janiero), these being the least known and main novelty of its work. In no particular chronological order, the authors use instructive episodes in the Institute's history to provide new insights on the Pasteurian legacy. …