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1[[quoteright:300:https://static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/images/the_story_of_louis_pasteur.jpg]]
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3''The Story of Louis Pasteur'' is a 1936 film directed by William Dieterle and starring Paul Muni. Muni is Louis Pasteur, who as the film opens, is already deep in his struggle to convince doctors in 19th-century France and around the world of the truth of the germ theory of disease. Pasteur confronts ignorance, skepticism, and scorn, even as he works to find vaccines for rabies and anthrax.
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5Paul Muni won the UsefulNotes/AcademyAward for Best Actor for this film. The film was nominated for Best Picture.
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8!!This film contains the following tropes:
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10* AllOfTheOtherReindeer: The French medical establishment is quite mean in its mockery of and scorn for Pasteur.
11* AnswerCut
12--> '''Empress Eugenie:''' Most people who go to hospitals are carried out--dead.\
13'''Emperor Napoleon III:''' Yes, Charbonnet. Why?\
14''[cut]''\
15'''Pasteur:''' Because our criminal disregard of germs and their power to invade the bloodstream...
16* AsYouKnow: The president of France says "You are all aware of the conditions" that the Germans have made for withdrawing from France, and then proceeds to explain them.
17* {{Biopic}}
18* DeathByChildbirth: A plot point, as "childbed fever" takes a terrible toll of mothers while Pasteur desperately tries to convince French doctors to sterilize their hands and wash their instruments.
19* EurekaMoment: Pasteur has one when Charbonnet [[ProfessorGuineaPig injects himself with Pasteur's rabies culture to prove that Pasteur's theories are wrong]], as Pasteur figures out that the solution Charbonnet used was three weeks old and too weak, and that such weakened virus cultures can be used for immunizations.
20* IgnoredExpert: No one will listen to Pasteur outside of the British surgeon, Joseph Lister.
21* ImADoctorNotAPlaceholder: "I'm a scientist, Zaranoff, not a magician!" says Pasteur after Zaranoff brings him some Russian peasants who've been exposed to rabies.
22* InMediasRes: The film doesn't waste time with Pasteur's youth or show him developing his theories, but instead starts right away with Pasteur getting in trouble with the Academy of Science for his views.
23* NotThatKindOfDoctor: This is a problem for Pasteur, and something that hurts his campaign to reform medicine--he isn't a doctor, he's a chemist.
24* ProfessorGuineaPig: Charbonnet injects himself with Pasteur's rabies culture to prove that Pasteur's theories are wrong. This leads Pasteur to a EurekaMoment in which he figures out that the solution Charbonnet used was three weeks old and too weak, and that such weakened virus cultures can be used for immunizations.
25* SleepingSingle: The Pasteurs sleep in separate beds. It kind of brings the question of how did they conceive their daughter.
26* TimeSkip: Over a decade from Pasteur's futile appeal to Emperor Napoleon III to Pasteur working in a rural province after the Franco-Prussian War.

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