Talk:Germ theory of disease

message: 20 Jan 2008
Does Doctor Ignaz Semmelweis not deserve a mention here?
See his wiki entry
Yes, that was going to be my point also. Surely he deserves a mention here. I am not a medical person; perhaps someone who is would like to write it up.  —Preceding unsigned comment added by 88.104.13.35 (talk) 21:44, 30 March 2008 (UTC)
thread_title: Dr Ignaz Semmelweis 

message: What's this for? I never heard this theory called "speculation" before:
:The germ theory of disease, also called the pathogenic theory of disease, is speculation that instead of genetics being the proximal cause of many diseases that the environment plays a significant factor in the form of pathogenic microorganisms such as bacteria or viruses.
Isn't it a scientific fact that germs can cause disease? I mean, if you drink water containing too much of a certain bacteria E. coli, don't you usually get sick?
Aren't there thousands of diseases which are known to medical science as being caused by bacteria or viruses? They check your blood for traces of these germs (or antibodies your body generates to fight them) when diagnosing the disease. I thought this was common knowledge. Uncle Ed 14:37, 5 October 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: Germ Theory isn't proven. That's why it has "theory" in it. The truth is, that even though we can speculate and observe and make educated guesses, we really haven't ever actually seen a germ cause a disease. Certainly there is cause to believe this theory and I certainly wouldn't want a doctor who completely threw it out the window. But you should not really take offense that it is called speculation. That's what it is. There's nothing wrong with that. The thing that makes science so revolutionary is that a good scientist (and I'll admit, there are plenty of bad scientists) is always the first to admit that he's just speculating.  It's the best guess we have at the time. What else can you ask for? - Kuzain 05:32, 13 February 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: That is rubbish. We have. See Robert Koch - Koch's postulates have been fullfilled for many diseases, including Helicobacter Pylori.  Midgley 05:05, 15 February 2006 (UTC)

text: Hey hey. Watch out on this one. You have to be careful with use of theory. A theory must be empirically proven (and all the evidence is leading to this with Germ Theory), but a hypothesis would be more accurate for Kuzain's point - something that has not been proven. See articles such as Evolution (but beware of the trolls) and Theory for further discussion on the subject. In the mean time, I am sure that theory is perfectly accurate in its usual semantic sense in this article. Ck lostsword|queta! 19:17, 16 February 2006 (UTC)
thread_title: Speculation

message: Maybe I'm missing something but why is this article tagged as disputed?  There does not seem to be much to indicate in the main article or on this talk page.  This is a pretty important topic and I'd like to see it fleshed out more and the dispute tag removed, but could someone indicate why it is there? Maybe someone who opposes something thats written now? Thanks -Sajendra 23:56, 17 December 2005 (UTC)
thread_title: 'Disputed' tag

message: "List of pathogenic / microorganism theories:
*Peptic ulcers / highly suspected pathogenic cause: Helicobacter pylori
*Cervical cancer / highly suspected pathogenic cause: Human papilloma virus
*Schizophrenia / unknown, see pathogenic theory of schizophrenia
Physicist Gregory Cochran has advocated a number of pathogenic theories of disease including one for homosexuality, concluding that this is a "feasible hypothesis"; however, he does not assert that there is sufficient evidence to show that it is factually correct. As of 2005, no experiments or studies have yet been attempted. At present, it is a speculative hypothesis.
*Rossignol's challenge to Pasteur
Need to mention: "Whatever Rossignol's challenge was, if we hear something about it we can then mention it - "need to mention" is talk page if ever anything was.
For the rest, the germ theory of disease is not a list of diseases with the germs that cause them, nor a list of diseases for which a germ is not known nor infection demonstrated.  (as an aside: if there is an infectious agent in Schizophrenia it is more likely to be a meme complex than a viral or bacterial informational vector, I think)
As for physicists speculating on a hypothesis, leave it out... when an experiment is run lets look at it. If those thoughts belong anywhere in WP, it is as the smallest of footnotes in teh articles on those diseases, conditions and habits. The germ theory is not a big thing, it needs a short article, free of wild speculation WP:NOR about other things.  Midgley 18:04, 11 March 2006 (UTC)
thread_title: Refined

message: References, and I think still a little tightening up.  Midgley 15:29, 12 March 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: Nice links that man. Midgley 20:36, 28 March 2006 (UTC)
thread_title: Article needs

message: Should not this article have this "{ {histOfScience} }" ? --Extremophile 14:41, 25 April 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: It's not liked from there, but it is linked from , so I added that. -- Beland (talk) 20:19, 1 January 2016 (UTC)
thread_title: History of science?

message: This abiogenesis area is a bit troublesome. Although people like Pasteur did defend the germ theory of diesease, they also defended things that today are commonly put under the label of abiogenesis or spontaneous generation, such as speculations on the origins of parasitic worms. Pasteur himself believed that parasitic worms were not a species of its own, but rather something formed from a person´s tissue, like a cancer that develops into an autonomous organism. That was called heterogenesis, commonly mistaken by abiogenesis or spontaneous generation, and despite of not being exactly so, it is still not germ theory of disease. Redi himself also did not discarded heterogenesis, even though he thought that maggots in meat came from eggs laid there, he did not applied the same logic with gall insects, which he thought that were really produced by the plant. Other possibility, since these things are commonly labeled as abiogenesis despite of their actual definitions, was that Pasteur defended xenogenesis of parasitic worms, which I do not really know of, but then that would be the "origin" by a parasitic by infection.
Additionally, I think that Redi being mentioned after Pasteur, introducing the paragraph with "talian physician Francesco Redi provided further proof against..." suggests that it occurred after Pasteur, since otherwise the article follows the history chronologically. I suggest to label it asking for review and sources...--Extremophile 14:05, 8 May 2006 (UTC)
thread_title: Redi and some other troubles

message: I think that the Varro quote ("there are bred certain minute creatures") is very weak as a reference to spontaneous generation.  It reads better as an early germ hypothesis. And I'm adding a criticism section.Ethan Mitchell 23:09, 16 May 2006 (UTC)
thread_title: Varro, etc.

message: I'm interested in collecting alternative approaches to medical treatment. Obviously, germ theory is indisputable science. Basically, I refer to vitalism and the approach that disease be cured through the body's immune system defences being enhanced rather than through avoiding them or through using drugs. I think germ theory is a more important aspect of treatment (since vitalism is unscientific in assuming the body somehow has an inherant ability to fight every single form of disease and that health is somehow a default state), but that a vitalistic APPROACH holds promise as complementary view in promoting immune system enhancement. The human immune system risks not evolving to keep up with germs since natural selection is weakened by medicine. Things like vaccines I would actually hold to be vitalistic. While they are drugs, the drugs are not killing the organisms directly, but rather enhancing the body's natural ability to recognize (so they can kill) the organisms. Other approaches like nutrition and exercise are similarly vitalistic preventative measures. Tyciol 18:14, 2 November 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: That doesn't really have anything to do with writing this encyclopedia article. -- Beland (talk) 20:15, 1 January 2016 (UTC)
thread_title: Alternative medicinal approaches

message: I have seen better pages, I have seen worse. Paul, in Saudi 16:25, 27 March 2007 (UTC)
thread_title: Why was this blanked?

message: The opening of this article claims that the germ theory of disease led to hygienic practices and the use of antibiotics. When I read the article on hygiene it clearly states several examples of strict codes of hygiene that were adhered to over long periods of time throughout large civilizations millenia prior to the germ theory of disease. Further, the article on antibiotics clearly states that the first deliberate use of antibiotics in medicine was by the Chinese 2500 years ago - again; long before the germ theory of disease. Either the claims in those two articles are fictitious or the claim in this article attributing these practices to germ theory is. Whatever the case, an expert on the issue should either clarify the claim here or remove it completely. I will mark it with a request for citation. Anon. 12 October 2007  —Preceding unsigned comment added by 192.100.104.17 (talk) 15:45, 12 October 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: The claim is not fictitious, but historically accurate, if incomplete. I propose adding, "in Western medical practice" unless some other editor can word it better. Religious hysteria directed towards Jews caused a severe disruption among Western Christians with hygienic practices of the past. This included rejection of many so-called "pagan" practices, which were also hygienic in a folk-medicine, practical way, even if the underlying principles were misunderstood.Apollo is the immediate and unseen cause, the magical agent, linking Chryses' curse with the deaths of the Achaeans from pestilence. The deaths are not accidental or coincidental. There's an explanation, even though it involves an invisible agency in which imaginative belief is required. Explanation is critically important because it allows the possibility of cure.Science clearly has a more powerful explanation for this disease today, but the Homeric explanation may have been useful in its day. In Homer, plague can be controlled through appropriate worship of Apollo, which includes not simply ritual songs but important ritual acts that are remembered in the songs: washing, removal of all wastes, and burning of disease victims. In ancient times, these rituals could have been effective means to stop the spread of epidemics. (Medieval approaches, many centuries later, had forgotten not only Apollo but the basic ritual acts of plague control. The Pied Piper is supposed to remove rats through music alone.) magic words in the Iliad
See also Contemporary_reaction_to_Ignaz_Semmelweis, who was self-evidently correct about hygiene from our POV, but was self-deluded according to his contemporaries, who did wash their hands (which is sufficient in most cases,) but nothing like the ritualistic scrub surgeons employ today. I hope, however, someone can come up with something better than  "in Western medical practice." Pawyilee (talk) 14:25, 7 November 2008 (UTC)
thread_title: Fictitious Claims

message: What's with this paragraph?
Microorganisms were first directly observed by Anton van Leeuwenhoek, who is considered the father of microbiology. Ignaz Semmelweis was a Hungarian obstetrician working at Vienna's Allgemeines Krankenhaus in 1847, when he noticed the dramatically high incidence of death from puerperal fever among women who delivered at the hospital with the help of the doctors and medical students. Births attended by the midwives were relatively safe. Investigating further, Semmelweis made the connection between puerperal fever and examinations of delivering women by doctors, and further realized that these physicians had usually come directly from autopsies. Asserting that puerperal fever was a contagious disease and that matter from autopsies were implicated in its development, Semmelweis made doctors wash their hands with water and lime before examining pregnant women, thereby reducing mortality from childbirth to less than 2% at his hospital. Nevertheless, he and his theories were viciously attacked by most of the Viennese medical establishment.
For one, the first sentence mentions Leeuwenhoek but the rest of the paragraph is about Semmelweis. This is very poor structure. Not only that, but the information regarding Semmelweis fails to clarify that its major contribution to the article is the fact that Semmelweis' work set precedents for that of Louis Pasteur - who is not only credited with "discovering" the germ theory of disease but is also shockingly absent from the article entirely. Anyone moderating might want to consider altering this.
--Chinagreenelvis (talk) 22:59, 21 February 2009 (UTC)
thread_title:  Leeuwenhoek/Semmelweis 

message: "Nardi, as it happens, does not mention Fracastoro. His authority (apart from Lucretius himself) is Felix  Platter. Platter, in his De Febribus (1597) ... had explicitly rejected arguments for the spontaneous generation of plague and syphilis, since these could not account for the fact that these were new diseases -- if they could be spontaneously generated they would have arisen over and over again. ... He thus carefully propounds the theory that these diseases are spread by seeds or germs [in Latin: "semen" -- wrongly understood not as "germs", but as "seminal fluid" after Platter and until Bassi] ... Platter is thus a proper germ theorist, the earliest known to me" (David Wootton, 2006: Bad Medicine - Doctors doing harm since Hippocrates, p. 127).  —Preceding unsigned comment added by 85.2.161.4 (talk) 18:45, 20 February 2011 (UTC)
thread_title:  Felix Platter: the founder of modern germ theory 

message: If there are specific statements that stand out as needing sources, please tag the specific text with citation needed, per WP:CHEAT. Biosthmors (talk) 18:25, 3 December 2012 (UTC)
replies: text: I left the tag for lede too short. --Harizotoh9 (talk) 08:58, 5 December 2012 (UTC)
thread_title:  I removed tags 

message: Per Varro#Works, shouldn't he be listed as a precursor? --Florian Blaschke (talk) 15:13, 26 June 2015 (UTC)
thread_title:  Varro 

message: In the 'pre-19th century' portion o this page, there is a long exposition on smallpox vaccinations and ayurvedic medicine. Its relevance to the topic of germ theory is questionable at best, because 'no one knew in those days exactly why the smallpox vaccine worked, or what really caused that (or any other) disease.' While interesting, the exposition is out of place, and should probably be amended to an end note.
Myopia1 (talk) 04:37, 13 December 2016 (UTC)
thread_title:  Smallpox vaccinations 

message: Why is Germ theory still called a theory.
It has been proven over and over again by infecting mice with pathogens that cause Tuberculosis, Typhoid, malaria, AIDS,... excreta.
How is that different than proven fact.Spidersmilk (talk) 20:33, 23 April 2017 (UTC)
thread_title: Germ "theory" of disease

message: Dear writer,
This theory, I am afraid, could be classified as a delusion.
Why? Years ago somebody gave me a scientific treatise about the delusion. Methodological it was solid "as a rock". The writer himself, surprised, formulating the way delusion was defined and used, asked himself if in this way the theory of relativity (Einstein) could be classified as a delusion.
Thoughts enough.
145.129.136.48 (talk) 09:44, 26 November 2018 (UTC)
thread_title:  Delusions? 

message: I am wondering why Athanasius Kircher is not mentioned in the opening paragraphs, in the second paragraph along with the others named there?
I have read elsewhere in the field of bacteriology it was Athanasius Kircher who "first proposed that living beings enter and exist in the blood (a precursor of germ theory)." 
I don't know the date of this, I think I've seen 1671, but his conclusions about microorganisms causing disease, after he examined blood under microscope, date from before that, in the 1640s-1650s as you can read below, so...?
He is mentioned on this page but only briefly under the "Late Middle Ages" , I think he deserves a more prominent mention, along with the other names in the opening paragraphs.
This is what you currently have for him under the section "Late Middle Ages":
"Microorganisms are said to have been first directly observed in the 1670s by Anton van Leeuwenhoek, an early pioneer in microbiology. Yet Athanasius Kircher may have done so prior. When Rome was struck by the bubonic plague in 1656, Kircher spent days on end caring for the sick. Searching for a cure, Kircher observed microorganisms under the microscope and invented the germ theory of disease, which he outlined in his Scrutinium pestis physico-medicum (Rome 1658).[19] Building on Leeuwenhoek's work, physician Nicolas Andry argued in 1700 that microorganisms he called "worms" were responsible for smallpox and other diseases.[20] "
On his own Wiki page it states:
 "Kircher took a notably modern approach to the study of diseases, as early as 1646 using a microscope to investigate the blood of plague victims. In his Scrutinium Pestis of 1658, he noted the presence of "little worms" or "animalcules" in the blood and concluded that the disease was caused by microorganisms. The conclusion was correct, although it is likely that what he saw were in fact red or white blood cells and not the plague agent, Yersinia pestis. He also proposed hygienic measures to prevent the spread of disease, such as isolation, quarantine, burning clothes worn by the infected and wearing facemasks to prevent the inhalation of germs. " 80.42.179.230 (talk) 15:44, 13 July 2019 (UTC)
thread_title:  Athanasius Kircher 

message: I am proposing to shorten the section on John Snow because there is a detailed sub-article about his work and therefore it does not need to be treated in quite as much detail here. Do you agree? That image of the cholera cases in London is repeated at several Wikipedia articles... So I am also proposing to delete it from this one. EMsmile (talk) 11:39, 31 January 2021 (UTC)
thread_title: Proposal to shorten the section on John Snow

message: I came across the following comment by William Farr from 1840 recently, which notably cites Henle and Holland and others for precursor contributions
to germ theory.  Can somebody with expertise comment?  Henle seems to have written something in German called "On Miasma and Contagia", and
was Koch's mentor, but what exactly his contribution is I do not know.
The hypothesis that the causes of epidemics are generations of minute insects
transmitted from one individual to another, through the medium of the atmosphere,
has been ingeniously put by Dr. Holland, in his “Medical Notes and Reflections.”
Henle, of Berlin, has supported the theory by new facts and analogies. The diffusion 
of contagion has a close analogy with fermentation; and Cagnard-Latour
and Schwann have shewn that fermentation is the decomposition of organic fluids
by minute vegetables of the lowest class. Putrefaction is a destruction of organic
matter effected by infusoria, and not a mere decomposition into elements. One
contagious disease, the muscardine of the silk-worm, is known to depend on the
development of a vegetable parasite. The germs are innumerable, and spread
with the greatest rapidity. In mixtures, certain genera of infusoria appear, and
then give place to new genera. Individual cases of disease may be caused by one
generation of parasites; an epidemic by successive generations. Each epidemic
disease has its specific animal contagion, its specific genera of infusoria. Henle has
proved the existence of this cause, and the truth of the theory in every way but
one; he has never seen the epidemic infusoria. The omission is, no doubt, im
portant; and the more so on the part of Henle, who is justly considered one of
the best microscopic observers in Germany. The infusorial hypothesis does not
satisfactorily explain the cause of epidemics; it accounts for them by the creation
of animalcules, but does not shew why the animalcules are created at distant times
in swarms. The phenomena of swarms of insects, of blight, and of infusorial gene
ration, may suggest investigation; but in the present state of pathology, they
cannot supply its place.—Pathologische Untersuchungen. Von Dr. Henle, Berlin,
1840.    British and Foreign Medical Review, April, 1840.
This seems to be correct. Henle published a lenghty essay in 1840 advocating the abandonment of miasma theory, as well as encouraging the investigation of alternative theories. Unfortunately the source I used in the swedish version of this article is indeed in Swedish. Fortunately it is also briefly mentioned in the preface of this microbiology textbook:  Dr Bowser (talk) 13:25, 14 February 2022 (UTC)
thread_title: Missing contributions

message: There were a couple of places where viruses was spelt virii. Virii is generally not used neologism. Certainly not used in the academic literature, in any case. I've used the "viruses" spelling to make it consistent with spelling elsewhere in the article.
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/virus#English 61.68.130.120 (talk) 00:53, 29 July 2022 (UTC)
thread_title:  Plural of virus 

message: It feels inappropriate to have a separate article just listing individual people's stories - the truly important people should be listed here (as they already are with less detail at Germ theory of disease#19th and 20th centuries) and the details already covered in other articles should be pruned. * Pppery * it has begun... 19:39, 16 August 2023 (UTC)
replies: text: Merge in reverse direction; I agree that there is duplication here, but the size of the other article (66k) suggests a merge into the section here would unbalance the page. Given that there is editorial interest in producing such semi-biographical content, I think that it's worth keeping - and if worth keeping, it's worth separating because of the amount of content. Consolidation should hence be to the separate article, Germ theory's key 19th century figures. A summary or excerpt can be left behind. Klbrain (talk) 18:21, 29 December 2023 (UTC)
thread_title:  Merge [[Germ theory's key 19th century figures]]