Germs
Germs are
bacteria, sometimes
virus or other
disease-causing organisms, (as in
germ warfare). Not to be confused with the term from
developmental biology. One of the first people to question the presence of some kind of disease causing substance was
Ignaz Semmelweis, a Hungarian doctor, practicing in an
obstetrics ward in the 1840s. He discovered that the death rate of the impoverished women attended by the nurse midwives was many times less than that of the wealthier women attended by the doctors. His observations led him to the conclusion, that it was a matter of cleanliness. The doctors, on their schedules, went directly from the morgue to the obstetrics ward and did not wash their hands. When he tried to present his findings to his fellow doctors, they scorned him and laughed at him. They couldn't believe in things they could not see! It wasn't until the 1880s and the work of
Louis Pasteur and
Joseph Lister that the truth of germs finally surfaced and was accepted by the scientific community.
See Also
