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Chronicle No. 1

Pasteur, “the untouchable myth”

The praises of Pasteur are heard all over the world and he is considered one of the most prestigious heroes of the human race, an untouchable myth, to the point that he has just been elected the second "Greatest Frenchman of all time", after Charles de Gaulle.

However, numerous facts reported in perfectly authenticated writings, coming from relatives or historians, should have been enough to bring him down from his pedestal. But the Pasteurian dogma is so deeply rooted in people's minds that the French still idolize an impostor. It is forbidden on pain of anathema to touch the conqueror of rabies who "saved little Joseph Meister, bitten in the hand by a rabid dog".

To tell the truth, there was no certainty that the dog was rabid and even if it had been, a rabid animal transmits the disease only in 5 to 15% of cases. Moreover, contrary to what we are taught, the rabies vaccine was not created by Pasteur, but by Henri Toussaint, professor at the Toulouse Veterinary School, whose name has not marked history.

On the one hand, Pasteur disguised the results of experiments that were not favorable to him, as a real forger would have done with the help of accomplices. Then, to achieve honors and glory, after having decried them, he appropriated certain works by other researchers, Davaine, Berthellot, and above all Antoine Béchamp, one of the greatest scholars of the 19th century, doctor, biologist, naturalist, whose work is virtually unknown today because it has been systematically discredited in favor of Pasteur's personal interests.

In 1886, both in France and abroad, the deaths to be officially put on the liabilities of the Pasteur method already amounted to 74 and history has retained only the "success" of this vaccine, but has forgotten to say that he had multiplied the deaths from rabies. Professor Michel Peter, eminent member of the Academy of Medicine, believed that "for unscientific reasons, Pasteur tried to make people believe in the frequency of rabies" and, in front of his peers at the Academy, Professor Peter concluded:

"Monsieur Pasteur does not cure rabies, he gives it"!

The anthrax vaccine is another imposture of Pasteur, but few people know today that this experiment was only a lamentable deception which caused the death of thousands of sheep. Adding a new lie to those surrounding Pasteur, Pr Axel Kahn, member of the French National Consultative Ethics Committee, Research Director at Inserm, and one of Pasteur's most loyal supporters did not hesitate to affirm that it was thanks to him that women no longer died in childbirth from puerperal fever. This discovery is in fact that of the Hungarian doctor Ignace Semmelweis who had observed that women no longer died when midwives took hygiene precautions, starting with washing their hands. You should know that he then triggered the laughter of his colleagues and failed to convince them despite obvious results.

It was claimed that the statistics he had published were erroneous, false, and he was dismissed. It would even seem that women giving birth may have been infected in order to discredit the veracity of his observations. He ends up committing suicide in despair. His work, published in 1861, was not recognized until 1890 and this delay cost lives. Revolted by this behavior, Louis-Ferdinand Céline defended it virulently by publishing his biography in 1937.

No doubt Axel Kahn did not read it. We can thus observe that this myth of Pasteur persists on totally erroneous bases, and now that Pasteur is no longer there to loot the results of his peers, it is the others who loot them in his name.

Sylvie SIMON

 

(All rights reserved © Univers-Spirale  – SUMMER 2005)

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