Germs. We're all familiar with the little creepy crawlies that are invisible to the naked eye but can make us really sick. But humanity didn't always know about these tiny microbes, viruses and bacteria (commonly all grouped together as pathogens) .
So what was the path to discovery that led us to realizing that tiny specimen even existed? And what did we believe before and after the germ theory of disease was considered the norm?
Well today on Origin of Everything we're going to take a stroll down memory (or history) lane to look back on all the twists and turns that led to the first germ discoveries of the 19th and 20th centuries and how these new revelations revolutionized the medical profession. So what were some of the working theories of disease before we knew what (actually) makes us sick?
Well hang on to your hats because some of these theories are going to sound positively medieval… or ancient historical at the very least. NPR's "Goats and Soda" does an interesting job of tracing the history of humans and disease.
In short, they note that early humans lived in forager and hunter societies where they were migrating and living further apart. As a result though they were often exposed to disease from interacting with the animals that they hunted for food, it was harder for these diseases to spread from human to human.
But with the rise of the domestication of animals and agriculture, humans began to settle down in fixed locations for long periods of time. This led to the development of towns and cities where diseases could spread from person to person more rapidly.
But rather than to do things that living in close proximity to wild animals and other dirty humans may not be such a hot thing, they attributed it to the rise of bad air. One of the oldest and most commonly held beliefs about the spread of disease was a practice known as "miasma theory."
Miasma theory stated that disease was spread by miasmas, an outdated word that essentially means "bad air" or night air. Miasmas were thought to emanate from foul smelling and unsanitary living conditions like human waste (yuck) , dirty water and rotting food.
The thought went that these gross conditions gave rise to miasmas that went on to cause major illnesses like cholera, malaria and the plague (aka Black Death) . And although this "bad air" belief may seem odd to us today, it had a strangely long staying power.
The roots of miasma theory date back to Ancient Greece, China and Rome and continued to be the prevalent theory of disease until the mid 19th century. That's literally hundreds of years believing that disease most likely came from one place.
