Home › D › Disease (GERM THEORY OF the theory)

Disease (GERM THEORY OF the theory)

GERM THEORY OF, the theory that certain enthetic diseases have their origin in vegetable germs that have found their way into the body and there undergo processes of growth which lead to chemical changes. The theory has been held with more or less distinctness for at least three centuries. To animalcules and micro-organisms were attributed diseases such as pleurisy, epilepsy, smallpox, the measles, syphilis, and malaria. The researches up to this time were, in 1762, summed up by Plenciz , a doctor of medicine in Vienna, who traced infectious maladies back to microorganisms in the form of animate vegetable and animal forms. Decomposition was shown by him to be the result of the development of living organisms, which, it was suggested, had been transmitted through the air. Before Plenciz had made the results of his researches public, Needham had promulgated his theory of spontaneous generation, following which a line of physicians, as a result of investigation with instruments of ever-increasing accuracy, established the principle rights, position, or privileges as an esthat life could only be engendered by previous life and that the germ theory germ theor alone was capable of explaining the general phenomena of certain diseases. certain diseases .

These investigations disclosed that all germs were not harmful, and that they infected the air in infinite variety, entering the body through every available channel, the mouth, nose, throat, and gastro-intestinal canal. However, the body is provided with a strong defense against its numberless enemies in its covering of skin, the mucous membrane, the lymphatic glands, the phagocytes of certain cells, and the antitoxins in the fluids of Observation of the action of certain germs shows that in diphtheria parts of the blood.

DISEASES OF THE EAR. See EAR.