Annals of medical history . the pages he devoted to it. But he graspedone very important thing, the analogybetween a fever and fermentation. Hemade the very Interesting observationthat there is no difference between thevintner and the physician; when the vatbecomes too lull in fermentation the vint-ner draws off some of the liquid, and hesaid: What is that but what we do with blood fermenting in a fever? That was agood reason lor phlebotomy. It was notuntil [857 that the problem of fermenta- A Patronal Festival for Thomas Willis (1621-1675) 123 tion was solved by Louis Pasteur, whoshowed that
Annals of medical history . the pages he devoted to it. But he graspedone very important thing, the analogybetween a fever and fermentation. Hemade the very Interesting observationthat there is no difference between thevintner and the physician; when the vatbecomes too lull in fermentation the vint-ner draws off some of the liquid, and hesaid: What is that but what we do with blood fermenting in a fever? That was agood reason lor phlebotomy. It was notuntil [857 that the problem of fermenta- A Patronal Festival for Thomas Willis (1621-1675) 123 tion was solved by Louis Pasteur, whoshowed that fermentation is not a purechemical process, but due to changes ow-ing to the growth of living bodies in thefluid. That is the greatest single dis-covery as far as the welfare of humanity showed that if one took the tiniest littledrop on the point of a needle from a fer-menting lluid and put it into a sugarysolution it would create fermentation;and, in just the same way, the tiniest dropof blood from an animal suffering from. Thomas Willis (1621-1675) is concerned, and it has had the farthestreaching influence of any single discoveryof the century. It revived the parallelwhich had been drawn 300 years beforebetween fermentation and fever. Fracas-torius had called attention to it in the 16thcentury, and Boyle had said that the manwho would solve the problem of fermen-tation would solve the problem of infec-tious fevers. Pasteur solved both. He anthrax would cause identical changes tooccur in the blood of another animal;there would be a multiplication of thegerms, a change in the fluid, and at theend of the fever produced by the anthraxone could not induce the fever again byinoculation. That was the foundation ofour modern treatment of infectious diseaseand the antiseptic treatment of this subject of fermentation, 124 Annals of Medical History Willis also dealt with intermittent feversand enteric or typhoid fever. He wasone of the first to describe an epidemicin 164
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