LOUIS PASTEUR DEBATES HIS FAMOUS THEORY ON FERMENTATION
Signed book: Examen Critique d’un ecrit posthume de Claude Bernard sur la Fermentation. Paris: Gauthier-Villars, 1879. Leatherbound hardcover in marbled slipcase, 5.75 x 9, 156 pages. Signed and inscribed on the half-title page in crisp black ink to famed lexicographer Emile Littre, “A monsieur Littre, de l’Académie francaise, Hommage de profond respect, L. Pasteur.” Autographic condition: fine. Book condition: VG/None in a VG case.
In the 1860s and 1870s Pasteur debated his controversial theory of fermentation with Justus Liebig and Pierre Berthelot, both of whom supported the hypothesis that yeast might secrete a soluble chemical capable of causing alcoholic fermentation independently of its producer. Examen critique, Pasteur’s last monograph, was provoked by Pierre Berthelot’s unauthorized posthumous publication of some of Claude Bernard’s notes on alcoholic fermentation, in which Bernard had criticized Pasteur’s theory of fermentation as a physiological process and claimed to have isolated a soluble ferment such as that hypothesized by Liebig and Berthelot. Embittered by Berthelot’s action-for Bernard had been one of his longtime supporters-Pasteur published a full-length critique of Bernard’s manuscript, containing the full text of the notes (even to Bernard’s rough sketches), and a comparison of Bernard’s experiments (which he carefully repeated) with his own. He claimed that Bernard’s results were dubious or badly interpreted, and criticized Bernard for allowing his interpretations of data to be dictated by a preconceived notion of the ‘fundamental opposition’ of organic synthesis to decay” (Norman 1660). D. S. B. 10: 379. Heirs of Hippocrates 1900.
