The theory of germs is the concept that pathogens can invade the human framework and cause a disease, and has not been accepted. The evidence of the theory of germs has accumulated over time, and like her, he made a hand of opposite assistance to the existing explanations about the way in which diseases and why diseases are manifested. However, the theory is in the center of our understanding of the reasons why many diseases occur, as well as the way they may have been shunned and cured.
In a new electronic book, Thomas Levenson, professor of clinical writing at MIT, covers the history of germs theory while attacking the broader consultation of the explanation of why safe concepts are established and are accepted while others are ignored. The electronic book, entitled “So very small: how humans have discovered microcosm, defeated germs, and can still lose the war opposite to infectious diseases” (Random House, 2025), gives the reader a day, while the struggles of humanity with germs continue in the form of antibiotic resistance and a new flavor to the anti -vaccin feeling.
Live Science spoke with Levenson about his new book, how germ theory was born and how his central dogma still faces denials of denials.
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Nicoletta Lanese: When you look at the story of how the theory of germs arose, was there any competitive concept about the disease that was difficult to evict?
Thomas Levenson: two hundred years, almost at that time, between the discovery of microbes and the first definitive demonstration that microbes are the agents of an infectious disease, that Robert Koch’s anthrax. I said: “Why did it take so long?”
One of the disorders of germs theory was that the dominant theory was not terrible. He properly describes the occasions plausibly. Towards the end of the era of pre-living theory, he even provided the framework to ensure things that were useful. The entire movement of hygiene arises from the concept that anything about destructive and decomposition is bad for you.
In the nineteenth century, you have been beaten when the disease is that “it is the punishment of God”, or what it has, that the company through which God imposed a disease would be through a type of corruption, or a miasma [the trust that the disease spread through the destructive air].
Even without the aspect of the divine judgment of things, the concept that corruption and decomposition can be transported from one position to the other in the air, which allowed it to perceive how paintings or the infection of epidemics at a safe distance. Contagion officially means playing, but it has evolved to represent anything that may have happened from one victim to another. And that explains a Lotarray . . . so Miasmo’s theory is not entirely unproductive. There is no emergency, you know: “Nothing makes sense here. We have to think about it in a new way. ” There have never been this type of time.
NL: It turns out that they understood the broadest situations that favored germs, but not that germs were the causal element.
TL: And I think it’s because they already had a causal element. One of the themes of the electronic book is this idea of hierarchies and the belief that their position is important.
[For example], living in poor situations is bad. Even without direct God involved, there is a strong ethical argument, [because the concept was that] the deficient ones are deficient because they are bad. “Look how they drink, look at the anguish in which they live, etc. , etc. The disease is considered, therefore, as a result, in a safe sense, broader environmental and social decisions. Some other people will say:” Well, you know, it is not the fault of the deficient ones that are deficient. These are the situations in which those that make them vulnerable to diseases live, however, these situations are things that we deserve to correct. “
And others said: “No, they live in those situations because they are who they are. ” But anyway, anywhere you find with this specific argument, the two parties agree with the underlying causality: shit situations, sick. And again, it is completely false; It’s just causing.
NL: In the book, you communicate on the initial resistance to hand washing. Could you summarize this?
TL: The wonderful delight to show that Hand Hing can prevent an infectious disease in its path is the remarkable delighted [Ignác] Semmelweis in Vienna, where it is at a rate of two biological districts: a completely non -public midwifery, and the other that is not completely public public and medical students. It has incredibly noticed other mortality rates: midwives have made much more wonderful than doctors to keep their patients with puerperal fever, what we know is now a bacterial infection.
Very often, doctors and male academics pass from a postmortem to a birthday, and he [Semmelweis] said: “I don’t know what it is, but there is something in their hands that bring a corpse. ” They call them “body particles” and when they are distributed with living patients, which produces this horrible result, this horrible disease.
He says: “We have to put anything between the post mortem room and the birth room,” and its Toarray solution. Call to use a chlorine solution, [that we now know how to be] a very strong antiseptic. He said: “You have to rub until you can no longer feel the body in your hands. ” And it’s enough.
[However], he did not accept, in a component because he was not a very intelligent medical communicator, and in component because the implications of what he had done to say that doctors have been killing their patients for decades. What Semmelweis showed [in the 1840s] is that this horrible scourge, this epidemic of puerperal fever that had defeated Europe and the United States caused through doctors sufficiently blank. It is something very socially guilty of saying.
NL: Was there a crucial moment that later sight of the hand washed with your hands?
TL: The great adjustments are beginning to occur in the years without delay after the US civil war [when many infantry soldiers died of inflamed war injuries]. The maximum vital to replace the concept of hospital and medical cleaning was probably Joseph Lister’s paintings in sterile surgery. Not only was women who died in custody of their gynecologists; Surgery was an incredibly harmful practice until the 1860s and 1870s.
Before there is anesthesia, you must really do operations, very fast, and there are not many things you can do. You can amputate. You can pierce holes in the skull to relieve tension when it is there. You can consult to function for bile calculations or kidney stones, although this has ended with infection and death. There was necessarily abdominal surgery.
Lister is one of the first to realize that the challenge is the microbes, and does it because one of his friends, which is chemical, tells him about the first works of Louis Pasteur in the microbes that spoil beer and wine. This was done in the 1860s, and the news came to Scotland, where Lister’s training. He said: “Ajá, perhaps the explanation why these surgical sites become inflamed every time is that those microbes that surround us in the air, and enter the injury and harm. “
This very caustic approach evolved: closes the lesion with a carbolic bandage with acid. And it worked. . . . Later, he carried out the first antiseptic operation, in a child who had a compound fracture, and could save his leg and save the child. Finally, it reaches aseptic, where, see the exit to kill bacteria on the site, see to prevent bacteria from getting there. And that’s when you get things like washing your hands [around the 1870s].
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NL: Not only is it done in the history of the theory of germs in the book, but also in today’s problems, in the specific construction of antibiotic resistance. To what extent do you think it is discussed?
TL: The antibiotic resistance scares the fluid of the frame of your choice. The intelligent news is that I think that the challenge of antibiotic resistance is a challenge that is well understood; There are not many other people to hide. It is not like vaccines, where there is true opposition to vaccines in themselves. No one is disappointed by the use of antibiotics, which I know.
In a way, there are at least two main things that you will have to do: it will have many investigations, some of which are not necessarily without delay are beneficial. There are promising paintings in progress, for example, in bacteriophages. These are viruses that infect bacteria that, at the beginning of the 20th century, were a very, actively processed concept [to treat bacterial infections]. Return and other paintings of people there.
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Then there is the search for more and other types of antibiotics, locating compounds that can interfere with bacterial metabolism in the way they have not known so far. There are many sciences to do there, which means that we have to pay, which is not what is happening in the United States at this time. The opposite happens; We have in our commitments to basic science and we go to programs of interest and biomedics.
The other thing to do, of course, is the use of antibiotics we have and this can evolve in the near future. This implies things such as cutting the use of antibiotics in animal foods, which seem to be much more careful with the prescription of antibiotics, especially for viral diseases, for which they will not do good, etc. , simply cutting the amount of evolutionary challenge that we put in front of bacteria so that we can reduce the resistance process.
But this requires collective action, and at this time, we [the United States] are worse than we have been. It is problematic.
Very small: how humans found microcosm, defeated germs, and can still lose war on infectious diseases: $ 32. 55 in Amazon
In “So very small”, Thomas Levenson tells the complex history of the way in which humans have noticed the almost invisible and global microbial germs that surround us. They unpack how and why concepts, such as germs theory, continue, accept or ignore, and how the human behavior of the brain can hinder the right questions.
NL: passing the vaccines, with the anti -cacuna sensation that we see now, do you think we have already been there? Or is it not precedents?
TL: The two.
The vaccine vaccine, vaccine resistance, vaccine rejection is as old as, and, in some directions, older than the same vaccines. Before genuine vaccines, other people had strongly denouncing the concept of smallpox inoculation [in which other healthy people were exposed to the liquids of the variolate wounds of other inflamed people]. It is before achieving the vaccine against the cow; It is in the 1720s. [People said] “violates God’s will; it is not natural; it is dangerous; they are all kinds of horrible things. ” And component of what Truearray said. It is not an operation without risk.
He obtains reactions similar to the first genuine vaccine of cow cow [which used to confer immunity from variolo] that began to spread in 1798. Almost without delay in a vaccine resistance, partly partially greedy in its nature. “You combine the things of a cow in a human body,” is almost obscene for people. There are those wonderful cartoons of this era, which show cow pieces that appear in babies, etc.
As you advance in time, there are rejections of vaccines and useless. There are vaccine rejections for non -secular reasons, with respect to their “inaccuracy. ” There are vaccine rejections as an unbearable extension of the force of the State in the creation of non -public resolution. Once you start having mandatory vaccination laws, which are found in the mid -nineteenth century, other people respond by saying: “No, you can’t do that. You can’t make you put this kind of thing in my body. “
We have noticed it in covoried vaccines, and now we see it with the development of resistance to popular vaccines in children’s disease as a requirement. And the effects are tragic and disastrous: there is this child who died in Texas, and at least there is some other death in the measles epidemic that is probably caused through the lack of vaccination. [Editor note: At the time of publication, the moment when the death of measles, as well as a third party was confirmed. ]
I see this as a continuation of how other people have responded to vaccines, but you also see things that, I think, are special in our new moment. Twenty years ago, the anti -cachamic feeling was not really a marker of political identification; Being antivacamal should not be codified obviously as related to a political or other attitude. It’s much less true now. I don’t want sugar; Obviously, when a Republican president appoints RFK Jr. as secretary of physical aptitude and social services, the agreement of this position with this wing of American politics is quite strong.
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I think that the great threat now is that the anti -cacamian feeling will become an even more partisan problem, and many other people will be associated with anti -vaccinity things without committing to the main points of the Orray argument . . . the consequences of the disease. It is something difficult to counteract.
There is no clinical or medical or genuine curtains that represents the exam that says that vaccines are bad, they are very good. They are the largest important invention, a facilitator of human realization, maybe never. Infectious diseases were the main cause of death for humans everywhere. It is no longer. And it is no longer in large part due to vaccines.
Editor’s note: This interview was held on March 27, 2025. It was changed for more clarity and duration.
Nicoletta Lanese is the editor, in the Chief of Health Channel in Live Science and was in the last editor and editor of personnel on the site. It has a Certificate of Higher Education in Clinical Communication of the UC Santa Cruz and the diplomas in neuroscience and dance of the University of Florida. His paintings gave the impression on The Scientist, Science News, Mercury News, Mongabay and Stanford Medicine Magazine, among other sales issues. Based in New York, he also remains very worried in dance and occurs in the paintings of local choreographers.