Debunk It! by John Grant

Author:John Grant
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Zest
Published: 2015-01-22T16:00:00+00:00

REJECTING THE GERM THEORY

Today we know that infectious and contagious diseases are caused by microbes (germs)—viruses, bacteria, and fungi—but until the nineteenth century, infection was something of a mystery. Some physicians believed epidemics were caused by miasmas. Rotting corpses were a good candidate for these bad airs; after all, in times of plague there were always lots of rotting corpses about.

In the early nineteenth century, several physicians recognized that improving hygiene led to reductions in the spread of infection. For example, in the 1840s the obstetrician Ignaz Semmelweis managed to reduce the death rate of mothers from puerperal fever in the Vienna General Hospital’s maternity wards from 18 percent to about 2 percent just by getting surgeons to wash their hands. The person who took the next step, producing what came to be known as the germ theory—that infection was spread by microscopic organisms—was the French scientist Louis Pasteur, working in the 1860s. In the 1870s, the UK surgeon Joseph Lister1 pioneered the application of the germ theory to hospital practice, developing the forerunners of the kinds of sanitation we expect in hospitals today.

A rival of Pasteur, the French biologist Antoine Béchamp, claimed the basic building block of living organisms is not the cell but an entity he called the microzyme. Microzymes could take on different forms. Sick people’s bodies were thus full of bacteria not because the malicious microbes had invaded from outside, but because some of the sufferers’ microzymes were taking the form of bacteria. Béchamp’s ideas are almost forgotten today.

Surprisingly, there are still a few people who, in the teeth of all the evidence, doubt the germ theory. Needless to say, these bullshitters aren’t qualified mainstream physicians. One of the most prominent is the comedian Bill Maher. He attempts to justify his antivaxerism (see next chapter) by questioning the discovery that lies at the very heart of the enormous success of modern medical science: the germ theory.

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