![]() Morris Fishbein, best-selling author on medicine and health, as well as an editor of JAMA. Strikingly, a very popular monthly magazine, Hygeia, published by the American Medical Association, carried a long, illustrated article about the play in 1923, written by no less a figure than Dr. Illustration: Henry Miller in Guitry’s play Pasture A page from “The Conquest of Hydrophobia,” 1923 in Hygeia. The play earned a rave review in the New York Times, but ran for only a few weeks. In 1923, the play was staged in New York with Henry Miller in the lead. ![]() And that version is connected further back in time to his play, performed and published in 1919 in Paris, in which Pasteur was played by Sacha’s father, Lucien Guitry, one of the most eminent actors of the French theatre world. This 71-minute film was written, directed, and performed by the renowned actor, dramatist, and director Sacha Guitry. ![]() Louis Pasteur, the Benefactor, 1942īut there is another explanation for these characteristics: the footage was all taken from a 1935 French film, titled simply, Pasteur. Yet, both aspects may have been intended to enhance the historical message that these events took place more than a half century earlier. The acting style is somewhat stiff and old-fashioned, and everything is all in black-and-white, instead of color, though color was newly on the scene. The entire story is carried by an animated voice-over from a single narrator, a common choice for educational films, as it is inexpensive and familiar to students. ![]() Watching the film with a critical eye, some aspects of the style and composition are notable. A Selected, Classified List of 2800 Films for Use in Classrooms, Libraries, Clubs, Army and Navy Training Camps, etc. “Portrays vividly the life of the famous French scientist including his struggle against the prejudices of the French Academy of Medicine it shows the famous experiment with rabies including the first injection given to a boy bitten by a mad dog and includes a resume of his scientific accomplishments, his final triumphs, and the eventual world wide recognition of his benefactions to mankind.” While one reviewer judged the film as “too condensed”-and it’s hard not to agree-overall, I share the view expressed by School Management. Two annotations given in a 1943 catalog reveal divided opinions. I suspect that the film worked remarkably well in providing viewers, especially young ones, a simplified but lasting image of Pasteur and his work in only a very few minutes, especially in a classroom where there might be discussion of the scenes and ideas right afterwards. Louis Pasteur, the Benefactor, 1942 National Library of Medicine #1200848072 The wholesale destruction of teaching films has reduced the ability of historians to understand what young people of that era were seeing in schools.įortunately for scholars and the public, the NLM has digitized this rare film in its entirety, making it viewable for free by anyone in NLM Digital Collections, or the NLM YouTube channel. Then, not too much later, this medium was superseded first by videotapes and then by digital formats. Such films were easily discarded since they were generally not part of a school library, but only a utilitarian audio-visual collection. The others faded into disuse or were damaged when a projector’s sprockets didn’t line up closely enough with the perforations. There were perhaps hundreds of prints of this film in circulation at the time, but the NLM’s copy is the only one known to have survived. ![]() The 1940s and 1950s were a golden age for classroom movies as projectors became more available and easier for teachers and students to operate. Little is known about it, but it seems to have been intended for schools, and perhaps for continuing education in the military. Pictorial Films released this film in the United States in 1942. In the United States, Pasteur has held a prime place in popular notions of science starting with his discoveries about wine in the 1870s, and the collections of the National Library of Medicine (NLM) are rich in a variety of Pasteur materials, including an unusual movie, Louis Pasteur, the Benefactor, which brilliantly evokes Pasteur’s rich career in just about 15 minutes. Last year marked Louis Pasteur’s 200th birthday with celebrations in many countries. In recent years he has published articles enlarging the received biography of Pasteur by showing the importance of artists and the art world in his personal and professional life. Hansen is Professor Emeritus of History at Baruch College of the City University of New York. Circulating Now welcomes Bert Hansen, PhD, to share his discoveries relating to a film about Louis Pasteur used in American classrooms in the 1940s which he generously donated to the National Library of Medicine in 2017. ![]()
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