Medical America in the Nineteenth Century: Readings from the Literature

The Germ Theory of Disease and Its Relations to Hygiene

FREDERICK A. P. BARNARD THE GERM THEORY OF DISEASE AND ITS RELATIONS TO HYGIENE Editor's Note It is perhaps unusual that a book of papers describing the development of medicine in America should include an essay by a layman on the germ theory, a scientific subject. Suffice it to say its author was an unusual man. Frederick Augustus Porter Barnard was born in Massachusetts in 1809, graduated from Yale in 1828, and then taught mathematics, natural history, and chemistry. In 1856 he became president of the University of Mississippi and eight years later was elected to the same office at Columbia University. He was a mathematician and an educator who possessed a good general scientific knowledge. These qualifications were ample preparation, then, for the President of Columbia University to lecture to the members of the American Public Health Association on the hottest scientific issue of the day. Perhaps it was even better that these words were,spoken by one who had no vested interest in the theory's acceptance. The sanitarians, along with the surgeons, had a very direct interest in the etiology of epidemic diseases and fevers of all sorts. For decades some hygienists had preached cleanups of cities, of dwellings, and of hospitals. They had done the right thing, but for the wrong reasons. Not until the advent of the germ theory and the discovery of numerous specific bacteria in the last two decades of the century did the filth theory of disease receive its proper rationale. The arguments between contagionists and noncontagionists raged long and fierce. A substantial part of the 1859 National Sanitary and Quarantine Conference in New York was taken up by a discussion of the contagiousness of yellow fever; the noncontagionists prevailed on that occasion. At stake was much of public health practice. If a disease was contagious, then strict quarantine should be imposed. If, on the other hand, miasmatic or chemical influences in the environment were to blame, then proper cleanups were to be introduced. It is well known that many of the leading British sanitarians of the time were anticontagionists . This group did not always accept cheerfully practices or theories that ran counter to their own.l In his paper, Barnard touched on the scientific, the religious, and the philosophical implications of the germ theory, as well as its practical ones. One must remember that he was writing in the same year in which O. H. F. Obermeier of Reports andPapers, A.P.H.A. 1 (1873): 70-87. ^ee especially Lloyd G. Stevenson, "Science down the drain/' Bull. Hist. Med. 29 (1955): 1-26, which is subtitled "On the hostility of certain sanitarians to animal experimentation , bacteriology, and immunology."Even at the end of the century George Bernard Shaw was still ridiculing the germ theory and vaccination. 278 FREDERICK A. P. BARNARD 279 Berlin discovered the spirillium of relapsing fever. Robert Koch's demonstration of the growth stages of anthrax was still three years in the future, and the so-called "golden age of bacteriology" was only a gleam in the eye of a few. Read in this context, Barnard's words are those of a perceptive and thoughtful man. Bibliographical Note William Bulloch, The History of Bacteriology, London: Oxford University Press, 1938; reprinted 1960. John Simon, Filth Diseases, and their Prevention, 1st American ed., Boston: Campbell, 1876. Phyllis Allen Richmond, "American attitudes toward the germ theory of disease (1860-1880),"/. Hist. Med. 9 (1954): 428-54. Erwin Ackerknecht, "Anticontagionism between 1821 and 1867," Bull Hist. Med. 22(1948): 562-93. Howard D. Kramer, "The germ theory and the early public health program in the United States," Bull. Hist. Med. 22 (1948): 233-47. No more striking evidence can be adduced of the intellectual advancement characteristic of modern times, than the general recognition among men of the universal reign of law. It is true that this general recognition has not yet become quite universal. There are not wanting many, even in our enlightened age, to whom the advent of a comet still brings feelings of dismay and in whose belief the wind literally bloweth where it listeth every day. The belief in lucky and unlucky days has by no means disappeared, and among even the well educated there are yet some who would not willingly put to sea on the brightest Friday morning that ever shone. It is difficult to disabuse the mind of impressions which almost inevitably find a place there in the infancy of individuals and of peoples...