Seeing germs, selling germs: translating Anglo-American bacteriology

ABSTRACT

The germ theory of infectious disease, which developed in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, is often considered a pivotal breakthrough in modern science, medicine, biology, and public health. The germ theory provided a new way to study disease in laboratory, clinical, and community settings, and a new rationale for public health intervention. This article explores two important facets of the germ theory; how the physical techniques and methods of studying germs in laboratories were taught to the first generation of doctors, and how the germ theory was communicated to diverse publics in clinical and community settings. Drawing on the concept of transnational science, I argue that late nineteenth and early twentieth debates around the laboratory practices of bacteriology and the public reception of the germ theory help us to understand the deeper ways that biomedical scientific knowledge is created, constrained, and communicated.

KEYWORDS:

• Germ theory
• bacteriology
• surgery
• translational science
• biomedicine
• laboratories
• public health
• health exhibitions

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 A rival French Commission of Isidore Straus, Emile Roux, Edmond Nocard, and Louis Thuillier, on the backing of Louis Pasteur, had identified the same comma bacillus as Koch, but failed to produce the disease in laboratory animals. The French Commission’s prospects ended in bitter tragedy, as Thuillier contracted and died of cholera in September 1884 in Alexandria, Egypt. See, Norman Howard-Jones 1984, 379–381. On Koch, see Christoph Gradmann 2009. As Chakrabarti has shown, there was outspoken skepticism of Koch’s discovery amongst the British medico-scientific community. See, Pratik Chakrabarti (2010), 153–168. Edward Klein was the most critical of Koch in Britain, see Bruno Atalic (2010), 43–47.

2 For more on late nineteenth and early twentieth century ideas around vision in science, medicine, and literature, see Martin Willis 2011; Kennedy 2010; Emilie Taylor-Pirie 2022.

3 Michael Worboys has went even further than Barnes, arguing that “there was no Bacteriological Revolution in late nineteenth century medicine.” See, Worboys (2007), 20–42.

4 See, for example: https://www.si.edu/object/nmah_1458873. Attempts to heroically view Novy as a forgotten bacteriologist is at the center of recent work. See, Kazanjian 2017).

5 The work of Joseph J. Kinyoun is instructive here. He first established in 1887 a bacteriological laboratory at Marine Hospital on Staten Island New York, and then become world renown for his bacteriological work in San Francisco during the Third Plague Pandemic. Interestingly, Novy was also sent by the American government to work with Kinyoun on plague.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Jacob Steere-Williams

Jacob Steere-Williams, PhD is an Associate Professor of History at the College of Charleston, where he also serves as the Director of Graduate Studies and Director Medical Humanities. His work focuses on questions of authority and expertise in the history of medicine, disease, public health, and the environment in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In addition to dozens of scholarly articles and public-facing essays, he is the author of The Filth Disease: Typhoid Fever and the Practices of Epidemiology in Victorian England (University of Rochester Press, 2020). He serves as the Associate Editor of The Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences, and is a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society of the United Kingdom.