Raw Milk Near Rockford, Illinois

Pasteur never used the word “pasteurization.” Others coined it as an honorific, first in French, then in English in 1881, applied to wine. The path to milk took another decade.

Every conventional milk carton bears his name, but Pasteur never pasteurized milk. His study of fermentation developed a heat-treatment for wine in 1865 and beer in 1871.

Harold J. Harris’s 1945 Coronet article “Raw Milk Can Kill You” shaped American pasteurization law on a fictional epidemic and survey data the author knew was misleading.

Milton J. Rosenau’s 1912 public health synthesis covered milk composition, disease transmission, certified milk, pasteurization standards, and infant mortality across 309 pages and six editions.

Before pasteurization reached milk, it was applied to wine and beer. The chemist who first proposed heat-treating milk was Franz von Soxhlet, in Munich in 1886.

Imprisoned in Prussia for his role in the 1848 revolution, Abraham Jacobi arrived in New York in 1853 and spent the next six decades building the institutional foundations of American pediatrics and shaping the debate over how urban children should be fed.