The Scientific Revolution in Victorian Medicine by A.J. Youngson

Author:A.J. Youngson [Youngson, A.J.]
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Tags: History, General
ISBN: 9780429670664
Google: zal-DwAAQBAJ
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2018-12-12T03:40:34+00:00

4 GERMS, INFLAMMATION AND ANTISEPSIS

In his Herbal! or Generall Historie of Plants published in 1597, Gerard describes the generation of the barnacle goose. He relates how – as had been believed for several hundred years – the barnacle goose breeds not from an egg, like other birds, but from a shell-fish, namely the ship’s barnacle. These shell-fish, he explains, grow like fruit on the branches of certain trees standing by the edge of the sea. As the fruit ripen, the little goslings emerge, which, if they fall into the sea, swim away, but unfortunately die if they fall on land. The book contains a picture of this goose-tree with five great tulip-like barnacles attached, and several little goslings swimming about in the water below. The tree, Gerard tells his readers, grows in remote places such as the small Isle of Foul-drey in Morecombe Bay, and he describes it exactly, not as some traveller’s tale, doubtfully recalled, but as something he had seen himself.

This kind of belief about the origins of living things amounted to a denial of the fundamental general principle of modern biology that all organisms, certainly all higher organisms, are self-reproducing. Earlier ages, on the contrary, believed that while this was quite obviously true in general, it was a rule that admitted a variety of exceptions. The barnacle goose was one. Another occurred when one sort of organism gave birth to creatures of a quite different kind. Even human beings, it was thought, might be subject to this sort of lapse or heterodoxy of nature. Thus when a woman in London, early in the eighteenth century, announced that she had given birth to rabbits, a large number of people, including some doctors, believed her. Such a story, one hundred years later, would have been met with general incredulity. But there continued into the days of Queen Victoria, even in the best-educated circles, the conviction that some kinds of creatures could be generated spontaneously within decaying matter. This belief went back at least to classical times.

In the second half of the seventeenth century knowledge increased, and the foundations of micro-biology began to be laid. An Italian physician, Francesco Redi, showed in a series of convincing experiments that maggots do not appear spontaneously in decaying flesh but come from eggs laid there by flies. This result was of limited value, however, because it was not generalised – on the contrary, Redi maintained that the grubs in oak galls, for example, were a case of spontaneous generation. Almost at the same time, a very significant scientific discovery was made in Holland. Van Leeuvenhoek, a draper by trade, ground lenses in his spare time and mounted them in his own microscopes. In 1676 he described, in one of a long series of letters to the Royal Society in London, how he had observed through a microscope four different kinds of minute living creatures in rain water:

The fourth sort of animalcules which I saw moving about were so small that, for all of me, no shape can be specified.

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