ABSTRACT
The chemical/mechanical model of the body led not only to improvements in surgery, but also to the development of drugs that both prevented and treated disease. Much of the chemical history of medicine from the seventeenth century onward is about identifying the cause, and very often the chemical cure for disease. Lady Mary Wortley Montagu is one of the very few women mentioned in most medical histories. Joseph Meister stayed connected to Louis Pasteur as the caretaker of his Institute, a connection reminiscent of the relationship between James Phipps and Edward Jenner. As a professor at the University of Strasbourg in 1848, Pasteur researched the process of fermentation. Along with Pasteur, Robert Koch and Ferdinand Cohn were principal contributors to the establishment of the germ theory of disease. In 1932 in order to understand the natural course of syphilis, the United States Public Health Service began an experiment that lasted until well after the Nuremberg trials.
