[Reflections on Three Episodes of Louis Pasteur's Life as Seen in the William Dieterle's Movie (1936)].

Abstract

Despite the criticism and reservations made about him still nowadays, Louis Pasteur may be considered one of the most important scientists of the last two centuries in public health, even if the work of the numerous scientists who preceded him have largely contributed to the successes he obtained without following too much to the rules of deontology and ethics currently in force in the world of research and medicine. He has definitively put down, by his experiments, the "theory of spontaneous generation" in force since antiquity, validated that of "germs or microbes", enacted the first rules of asepsis, while inspiring those of the antisepsis applied by Joseph Lister, and developed a certain number of vaccinations in veterinary and human medicine, including the anti-rabies, the one which made him famous all over the world. All this was not done without difficulty and Pasteur encountered for a large part of his life the misunderstanding of his contemporaries and the hostility of the medical world to which he did not belong. The authors comment in this text the movie The Story of Louis Pasteur by William Dieterle, filmed in 1936, based on the knowledge acquired since that date and doing the part of the real and the fiction.