title: Joseph Lister: first use of a bacterium as a 'model organism' to illustrate the cause of infectious disease of humans.
abstract: Joseph Lister's goal was to show that a pure culture of Bacterium lactis, normally present in milk, uniquely caused the lactic acid fermentation of milk. To demonstrate this fact he devised a procedure to obtain a pure clonal population of B. lactis, a result that had not previously been achieved for any microorganism. Lister equated the process of fermentation with infectious disease and used this bacterium as a model organism, demonstrating its role in fermentation; from this result he made the inductive inference that infectious diseases of humans are the result of the growth of specific, microscopic, living organisms in the human host.
authors.affiliation: Department of Biology, Haverford College, 370 Lancaster Avenue, Haverford, PA 19041, USA. msanter@haverford.edu
authors.forename: Melvin
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Santer
mesh_terms: D000818:Animals; D001424:Bacterial Infections / Q000266:history*; D018407:Bacterial Physiological Phenomena; D001432:Bacteriology / Q000266:history*; D049672:History, 19th Century; D006801:Humans; D007239:Infections / Q000266:history*; D013294:Lactococcus lactis / Q000302:isolation & purification; D008297:Male; D008892:Milk / Q000382:microbiology