Today, I would like to write about something slightly different. Germs! Microbes! Well, I know it is not most people's favorite subject, but from my point of view, it is very important, and it plays key role to our health since millions of years ago. I will discuss about our primal ancestors, how they were associated with these organisms since long time ago.
Over the millions of years that human and their ancestors lived as hunter-gatherers, they populations remain too small to allow a deadly infection to last long, or to travel far before killing everyone off. Microbes, use humans as secondary homes, while residing primarily in animals such as insects. Of these, the mosquito-borne malaria parasite, maybe the oldest and the deadliest.
When tribes of Homo sapiens first hiked north of Africa some thirty thousand years ago, they largely escaped their tropical parasites and enjoyed a prolong era of robust health. This is not to say that hunter gatherers enjoyed an idyllic existence. Starvation and injury made for a short and brutal lifespan, but it was nonetheless a life span largely free of infectious disease.
With civilization, well behaved microbes abruptly lost their near-monopoly over the human body and a new microbial lifestyle arose. Thee real carriers of the infectious organism, rats and their attendant fleas, had massively multiplied. thriving in the household waste that the working poor tossed from their windows for lack of a better option.
Now, let's talk about the reborn of germ theory. Does anyone know when does the first maternity wards open in Europe? Well, the answer is late 1700's. That time proven to be especially deadly as well, with childbed and fever racing through the newly popular maternity wards and killing thousands of people. And no wonder, for the doctors and midwives were constantly moving between the sick and the merely birthing, thrusting contaminated hands and instruments high into raw and torn birth canals and wombs. But the idea that medical workers might be spreading infection was shared by few and shunned by many.
In fact, the controversial concept would destroy many careers. The first was that of the Scottish surgeon Alexander Gordon. He noted the resemblance between the milky substance seen in the wombs of women dead of puerperal fever and the wound infections. Gordon's proposed cure for puerperal fever was all but medieval, but his recipe for preventing its spread was spot on. He noted that the patient's apparel and bedcloths ought be burnt or thoroughly purified, and the nurses and physicians who have attended the patients affected with the puerperal fever ought carefully to wash themselves and get their apparel properly fumigated before it be put on again.
Then, a half century later, Oliver Wendell Holmes tried unsuccessfully to hector doctors of the Atlantic into recognizing the infectious nature of puerperal fever. He was then dismissed as another crazy 'contagionist' physician, and he left medical practice few years later. The same year Holmes abandon medical practice, the Hungarian physician Ignaz Summelweis supplied clear proof of both Gordon's and Holmes's contagionist theories. But, after Ignaz Summelweis died, European and American doctors had largely split into two camps, the contagionist and the sanitarians. The contagionists are the ones who advocated germ theories, and sanitarians, are the ones who clung to the idea of miasmas. Fyi, the miasma theory, refers to the believe of diseases such as cholera and chlamydia were caused by 'poisonous aires' arose from filth and decay.
On the contagionist side, a number of researchers had glimpsed the presence of microscopic organisms in diseased tissues. But, many countered that if, in fact, bacteria existed in the blood and tissues of the sick, they did not cause the disease, rather they sprang spontaneously from the dead and dying tissue.
The early microbe hunters could not discern the profound differences between the ultrasimple 'prokaryotic' cell of a bacterium, and the larger, more sophisticated 'eukaryotic' cells of microscopic parasites such as protozoa and fungi. They also mistakenly assumed that viruses were infectious microorganisms that were too tiny for them to see with their most powerful microscopes. We now know them to be nonliving particles of protein wrapped nucleic acids (which is our DNA and RNA), that enter our cells and there get mistakenly copied, to fuel a new round of infection.
Right now, I conclude the first post of this 'Germs' series. Stay tuned as I will make time to write the second post hopefully in few days time. Take care.
When tribes of Homo sapiens first hiked north of Africa some thirty thousand years ago, they largely escaped their tropical parasites and enjoyed a prolong era of robust health. This is not to say that hunter gatherers enjoyed an idyllic existence. Starvation and injury made for a short and brutal lifespan, but it was nonetheless a life span largely free of infectious disease.
With civilization, well behaved microbes abruptly lost their near-monopoly over the human body and a new microbial lifestyle arose. Thee real carriers of the infectious organism, rats and their attendant fleas, had massively multiplied. thriving in the household waste that the working poor tossed from their windows for lack of a better option.
Now, let's talk about the reborn of germ theory. Does anyone know when does the first maternity wards open in Europe? Well, the answer is late 1700's. That time proven to be especially deadly as well, with childbed and fever racing through the newly popular maternity wards and killing thousands of people. And no wonder, for the doctors and midwives were constantly moving between the sick and the merely birthing, thrusting contaminated hands and instruments high into raw and torn birth canals and wombs. But the idea that medical workers might be spreading infection was shared by few and shunned by many.
In fact, the controversial concept would destroy many careers. The first was that of the Scottish surgeon Alexander Gordon. He noted the resemblance between the milky substance seen in the wombs of women dead of puerperal fever and the wound infections. Gordon's proposed cure for puerperal fever was all but medieval, but his recipe for preventing its spread was spot on. He noted that the patient's apparel and bedcloths ought be burnt or thoroughly purified, and the nurses and physicians who have attended the patients affected with the puerperal fever ought carefully to wash themselves and get their apparel properly fumigated before it be put on again.
Then, a half century later, Oliver Wendell Holmes tried unsuccessfully to hector doctors of the Atlantic into recognizing the infectious nature of puerperal fever. He was then dismissed as another crazy 'contagionist' physician, and he left medical practice few years later. The same year Holmes abandon medical practice, the Hungarian physician Ignaz Summelweis supplied clear proof of both Gordon's and Holmes's contagionist theories. But, after Ignaz Summelweis died, European and American doctors had largely split into two camps, the contagionist and the sanitarians. The contagionists are the ones who advocated germ theories, and sanitarians, are the ones who clung to the idea of miasmas. Fyi, the miasma theory, refers to the believe of diseases such as cholera and chlamydia were caused by 'poisonous aires' arose from filth and decay.
On the contagionist side, a number of researchers had glimpsed the presence of microscopic organisms in diseased tissues. But, many countered that if, in fact, bacteria existed in the blood and tissues of the sick, they did not cause the disease, rather they sprang spontaneously from the dead and dying tissue.
The early microbe hunters could not discern the profound differences between the ultrasimple 'prokaryotic' cell of a bacterium, and the larger, more sophisticated 'eukaryotic' cells of microscopic parasites such as protozoa and fungi. They also mistakenly assumed that viruses were infectious microorganisms that were too tiny for them to see with their most powerful microscopes. We now know them to be nonliving particles of protein wrapped nucleic acids (which is our DNA and RNA), that enter our cells and there get mistakenly copied, to fuel a new round of infection.
Right now, I conclude the first post of this 'Germs' series. Stay tuned as I will make time to write the second post hopefully in few days time. Take care.
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