{"id":27156,"date":"2023-07-20T11:00:17","date_gmt":"2023-07-20T15:00:17","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/circulatingnow.nlm.nih.gov\/?p=27156"},"modified":"2024-11-13T16:29:03","modified_gmt":"2024-11-13T21:29:03","slug":"pasteur-in-the-classroom-re-discovering-a-1940s-film","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/circulatingnow.nlm.nih.gov\/2023\/07\/20\/pasteur-in-the-classroom-re-discovering-a-1940s-film\/","title":{"rendered":"Pasteur in the Classroom: Rediscovering a 1940s Film"},"content":{"rendered":"

Circulating Now welcomes Bert Hansen, PhD,<\/em> 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. Dr. Hansen is Professor Emeritus of History at Baruch College of the City University of New York. 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. <\/em><\/p>\n

Last year marked Louis Pasteur\u2019s 200th birthday with celebrations in many countries. 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<\/a><\/em>, which brilliantly evokes Pasteur\u2019s rich career in just about 15 minutes.<\/p>\n

Pictorial Films released this film in the United States in 1942. Little is known about it, but it seems to have been intended for schools, and perhaps for continuing education in the military. The 1940s and 1950s were a golden age for classroom movies as projectors became more available and easier for teachers and students to operate. There were perhaps hundreds of prints of this film in circulation\u00a0 at the time, but the NLM\u2019s copy is the only one known to have survived. The others faded into disuse or were damaged when a projector\u2019s sprockets didn\u2019t line up closely enough with the perforations. Such films were easily discarded since they were generally not part of a school library, but only a utilitarian audio-visual collection.\u00a0 Then, not too much later, this medium was superseded first by videotapes and then by digital formats. The wholesale destruction of teaching films has reduced the ability of historians to understand what young people of that era were seeing in schools.<\/p>\n

Fortunately 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<\/a>, or the NLM YouTube channel.<\/p>\n