Abstract
Nothing is more striking, even to the casual observer, than the change that has taken place in the attitude of the public, no less than of those who have charge of the public health, towards those great epidemic outbreaks that swept Europe up to the end of the eighteenth century “and after.” Until the Great Fire of London in 1666—indeed, until the rise of the great school of sanitary reformers of whom Chadwick and Simon may be taken: as types—panic and despair were the predominant emotions aroused in the presence of plague, cholera, and the like. With a knowledge of the results of what could be done by the adoption of efficient sanitary measures, these two paralysing influences were gradually rendered less effective, especially as the call to preventive and curative work could be made to divert men's minds from brooding and evil anticipation. Men then realised how much could be done to ameliorate the conditions of communities attacked by these diseases, and how successful were the preventive measures adopted as regards transference not only from community to community, but from individual to individual, with the result that organisation took the place of panic and hope succeeded on despair. Still, men were working in the dark, and the mystery enshrouding the mode of spread of disease was profound until Pasteur, Koch, Lister, and their many disciples gradually evolved from the chaos of theory, fact, and fancy the germ-theory of disease, and isolated from the welter of organisms by which the patient was surrounded the one that in each case appeared to be the specific cause of the disease.
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Cholera and its Control . Nature 84, 239–240 (1910). https://doi.org/10.1038/084239c0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/084239c0