According to what I read, Louis Pasteur finally put the germ theory of disease on a firm footing…after him ,people learned that simple cleanliness (doctors washing their hands, pasteurizing milk, sterilizing surgical instruments) dramatically reduced the death rate.
Why did it take to long to recognize the connection between dirt and disease? For example, people knew that drinking beer and tea (both beverages having been boiled) was a lot healthier than drinking water. An English physician(in the 19th century) recognized that cholera was spread by contaminated water. Plus, many medieval surgeons learned that cleaning a wound with brandy, and dressing it with a clean cloth, reduced the chance of a fatal infection.
So, with all of this evidence, why did it take to long for doctors to accept that germs caused disease?
Because early medical professionals did not believe what they could not see.
Like, years ago people believed that birth was mysterious, like budding from a plant or something and they have paintings showing animals being born from weeds and so forth, YET farmers dealt with live stock births so they knew where infant animals came from and midwives and doctors knew where children came from. Still, the general belief in birth was a wacky misconception for ages.
Doctors were also the elite of the times when the population mainly could not read more than a few words, and they tended to be arrogant as intellectuals, being jealous over new discoveries or anyone shaking up the tried and true methods of the times.
Like amputation, with no painkillers, was a thing of speed, not precision and bladder surgery was done by slicing open the awake patient and sticking one’s unwashed hand into the open wound to remove bladder stones, then stitching them up in a hurry.
I have a book depicting real surgery in the colonial times and it mentions the use of a huge, black cigar as a relaxant. They shoved it up the patient’s ass for a few minutes for the nicotine to absorb, then removed it, wiped it off and used it on other patients later.
Yes, I think “arrogance of experts” is the main explanation. Ever it was thus, and the same problem continues in science today. Any extremely revolutionary idea will be rejected, even attacked and ridiculed, for about a decade.
And here’s a link to a list of “ridiculed/vindicated geniuses” I’m compiling:
Add to the above the utter impracticality, in the 19th century, of making people’s environment clean of microscopic things no one could see. They might have guessed being clean made a difference, but how clean? What needed to be clean?
Heck, we know now that viruses are transmitted by touch, by sneezing, etc., and does that stop people from shaking hands? Nope. Are there people who’ll die because they’re slaves to shaking hands? Sure.
Also, add the utter confusion as to the multiple effects of poisoning, bacteria and viruses. Beer drinkers avoided cholera, but they also must have had a higher accident rate on the job (beer was a part of many wages in early America). People who abstained, but who had a fresh well, wouldn’t get cholera. And then there were plenty of people who thought the bad taste meant the water was medicinal, and purposely drank it. Nowadays this seems like muddled thinking, but notice that there’s no accepted opinion on whether Vitamin C, chicken soup, or aspirin are useful for maladies.
What, little evil creatures you say? So small we can’t see them, but powerful enough to kill a man? Riiiight.
Are you saying that God created these creatures, bringing misery and disease to his creation? Well there’s no mention of them in my Bible. Or are they tiny servants of the devil? In which case what we need here is a good priest, not your fantasies.
Either have this fool put in the nearest lunatic asylum or we’ll have him up in front of the next church court for blasphamy.
The basic idea of the germ theory and how to combat such infections was developed and successfuly put into practice by a Hungarian doctor, Ignaz Semmelweiss in about 1850. Unfortunately he was a Hungarian and they were “second class” citizens in the Austro-Hungarian world of medicine of the time. In addition, the practice of medicine, as a doctor told me when discussing this, hadn’t then yet completely emerged from the middle age practice of bleeding to get rid of “bad humors” in the system.
Semmelweiss is on bbeaty’s list of “ridiculed/ignored geniuses.”
This link Ignaz Semmelweiss gives a little data. An excellent novel, The Cry And The Covenant, is based on the struggle of Semmelweiss to get his idea accepted.
Well, lets see. Van Leeuwenhoek first discovered microscopic life in the 1670s, and the first description of bacteria in a publication was by him in the London Royal Society’s publication in 1683. He didn’t have any idea what they were, though, or what they did. He and his collegues thought they were just a form of microscopic plant.
Pasteur then goes on to propose the germ theory in 1864, I believe. So, that’s about 190 years. But, after he proposed the theory and published his experiments, it was accepted pretty quickly. Not long after, Jacob Lister is using carbolic acid to disinfect wounds, and in 1876, Robert Koch was able to isolate anthrax bacteria and show they caused the disease in horses. In the 1870s, the existance of the “virus” was theorized, and in 1878, Carlos Finlay proposed that mosquitos can carry yellow fever viruses. So, what made you come to the conclusion that the germ theory of disease did take a long time to be accepted?
<hijack> Chicken soup, I read somewhere, has become recognized for having healing properties for there is that within a chicken which actually boosts up the immune system to a degree. <end hijack>
Umm, the battle is still being fought.
My SO has worked in hospitals and seen unbelievable practices.
At one Osteopathic hospital she once worked at: There was an old doctor (non-DO) who had his hospital priviledges removed at all the “real” hospitals in a Large Western City. But this hospital didn’t care, since he brought in patients. The guy regularly went from patient to patient without washing or using gloves. A very high mortality rate. The hospital pathologist helped cover up the real causes of death to avoid lawsuits. This was the 1970s and has seen similar stuff in intervening years.
Hospitals have a lot of scary bad bugs running around and many patients suffer (and die) from hospital acquired infections all the time.
It wasn’t until the AIDS scare really started to hit home that some changes were made. At least staff can get equipment now to protect themselves. You would be surprised how hard it was to have such basic things like bulb (vs mouth) pipettes for the labs.
To shamelessly crib from Thomas Kuhn, it’s simply not enough for someone to come up with a hot new theory to have scientists fall all over themselves to accept it. You need to have LOTS of clear examples of things that the OLD theory can’t explain, but the NEW theory can. Remember, our ancestors may have been ignorant, but they weren’t stupid.
The old way of explaining diseases, either through internal bodily imbalances or through poisonous miasmas in the air or water, actually had some merits. For example, the old line on malaria was that it came from bad air (hence the name) like you’d find around swamps. SO, to deal with malaria, you should avoid living around a swamp OR you should drain the swamp. Result: your old theory, incorrect to our eyes, actually led to the desired result. Why ditch it in favor of a new and untried idea?
Likewise quarantine as a way of dealing with epidemic disease: it’s been known for centuries, it’s demonstrably effective, and it does not require the germ theory of contagion. Why bother with accepting a new theory about things that you cannot see?
Of course, the list of “ridiculed individuals later decisively proven wrong but still clinging to their theories” would be much, much longer.