Describes Pasteur's roles in improving health practices in France and identifies the other forces that helped implement his ideas about health care. What can one man accomplish, even a great man and brilliant scientist? Although every town in France has a street named for Pasteur, was he alone able to stop people from spitting, persuade them to dig drains, influence them to undergo vaccination? Pasteur's success depended upon a whole network of forces, including the public hygiene movement, the medical profession (both military physicians and private practitioners), and colonial interests. It is the operation of these forces, in combination with the talent of Pasteur, that Bruno Latour sets before us as a prime example of science in action.…
"The book is an ambitious contribution that starts off by comparing accounts of the great scientist with those of Napoleon to try to figure out what is special about how we narrate the lives of scientists compared to those of others, including generals or political figures, but it quickly goes even farther in its historiographic contributions. Microbes enter into the narrative. The book’s “hylozoism,” or its inclusion of non-human agents, seemed heretical at the time it was published. Still, no one can deny that Pasteur was only successful in his scientific work because he managed to make microbes work for him. In the era of COVID-19, where we are all concerned with making viruses behave in our favor with vaccinations, masks and other strategies pioneered by Pasteur, the book is a must read. The Pasteurization of France is one of Bruno’s early books (in my opinion those are the best), which came after Laboratory Life and Science in Action . It marked him as one of the most creative and controversial thinkers in the field of science studies. I know Bruno personally and have also heard mouthfuls about him from his most severe critics. His Pasteur “biography” was amply criticized by historians who admittedly knew much more about that time period. Simon Schaffer, also one of my mentors, wrote a scathing review titled “The Eighteenth Brumaire of Bruno Latour.” Sociologists of science went after him mercilessly as well, often protesting that the book was not sufficiently Marxist or materialistic in its approach. But those faults are also its strength, and its bad press only helped its author sharpen his message."
