Louis Willems

Louis Willems (25 April 1822, in Hasselt – 21 January 1907, in Hasselt) was a Belgian doctor, and one of the pioneers of bacteriology and immunology .

He studied medicine in Leuven, receiving his doctorate in 1849 . He was the son of Pieter Jan Willems, a gin distiller and the mayor of Hasselt between 1836 and 1842. His statue stands next to the National Genever Museum in Hasselt.

Because of the gin industry the area around Hasselt had a large amount of livestock, as the waste products, fermented grains, were used to fatten cattle. An outbreak occurred around 1828 in Belgium of a lung plague, described as being like the farmer's disease. In 1833 the disease reached the Netherlands, particularly in the so-called "flushing district" in and around Schiedam. It reached Hasselt in 1838. It was contagious bovine pleuropneumonia, a disease that still occurred in outbreaks at the end of the twentieth century, such as France in 1980. In Australia a national eradication program led to disease-free status by 1973. In Asia, Africa, the Iberian Peninsula and Eastern Europe in the late twentieth century, the disease was still present. It not until 1898 that the described causality was accepted.

This disease, which ravaged livestock, hit the income of the Willems' family itself. Interested by a competition from the Academie Royale de Medecine de Belgique, the graduate physician focused on these issues, and he began re-training at the École nationale vétérinaire d'Alfort near Paris, gaining further knowledge in the Netherlands and Germany. Soon he discovered in the lungs of diseased animals, microscopic organisms (genus Mycoplasma), which he labelled as agents of the disease (now known as Mycoplasma mycoides subspecies mycoides biotype small colony).

Analogous with the treatment of smallpox, he injected an extract of the affected bovine lungs (pus) into the posterior end of laboratory animals, which produced a local infection that prevented the lung disease. The first method, namely injections in the abdomen of the cattle, all too often led to infection and death of the "treated" animals. He systematically investigated relocation of the vaccination site and also found that new injections had little additional negative effect. Dogs, sheep, chickens, rabbits and turkeys did not show a disease from the antigen, and he came to the conclusion that it was not insanitary conditions, but an internal agent peculiar to cattle that caused the epidemic.

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