So Very Small

The centuries-long quest to discover the critical role of germs in disease reveals as much about human reasoning—and the pitfalls of ego—as it does about microbes.“Essential reading . . . Thomas Levenson brings to brilliant life the social history of medical detective work and illuminates the fascinating world of pathogenic microbes.”—Deborah Blum, New York Times bestselling author of The Poison SquadScientists and enthusiastic amateurs first confirmed the existence of living things invisible to the human eye in the late seventeenth century. So why did it take two centuries to connect microbes to disease? As late as the Civil War in the 1860s, most soldiers who perished died not on the battlefield but of infected wounds, typhoid, and other diseases. Twenty years later, the outcome might have been different, following one of the most radical intellectual transformations in history: germ theory, the recognition that the tiniest forms of life have been humankind’s greatest killers. It was a discovery centuries in the making, and it transformed modern life and public health.As Thomas Levenson reveals in this globe-spanning history, it has everything to do with how we see ourselves. For centuries, people in the West, believing themselves to hold God-given dominion over nature, thought too much of humanity and too little of microbes to believe they could take us down. When nineteenth-century scientists finally made the connection, life-saving methods to cont
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