Revolutionary science

Discovery of the Germ

Reading this makes me glad to have been born in a time when doctors routinely scrub up before an operation! Time was they went from one patient (or corpse) to another with no more than a quick wipe of the scalpel on their surgical aprons!

I learned some time ago that the reason why so many women died of puerperal fevel after childbirth was precisely because doctors refused to wash their hands following autopsies and prior to delivering a baby.

Years earlier I remember seeing a series of photographs of the progress of infection of a mere scratch on the ankle of an unfortunate man who either could not get, or refused, treatment. The scratch developed into a nasty wound, the infection spread into his leg and eventually gangrene set in and his leg had to be amputated below the knee. What still puzzles me is how the photographer was able to get the shots and yet the man's foot could not be saved.

Nowadays a simple tetanus shot could have prevented that, and even simply cleaning a wound and protecting it from dirt can help avoid complications.

How we take for granted such simple precautionary measures as isolating infectious patients, the need for vaccinations, basic hygiene in hospitals and food preparation, and proper sanitation.

As Waller says, "only the term 'revolutionary' can convey a proper sense of the magnitude of the change that medical practice has undergone." The rapidity of the identification of various causes of infectious disease was almost overwhelming - medical students found their text books out of date, but more importantly the causes of scarlet fever, tetanus, typhoid fever, pneumonia, anthrax, cholera, tuberculosis, leprosy, diphtheria, gangrene and gonorrhoea were found in the space of just a few decades.

If only science as encountered at school had been as palatable as Waller makes it, I might have been persuaded to study it for longer.