re: #54 Dr Lizardo

That was it; Dr. John Snow.

Apparently, it took another 30 years before his hypothesis that cholera was being spread through contaminated water was widely accepted.

Medical “science” back then was not that far away from witchcraft or herbal treatments. Germ theory, as it was called then, took a long time to be accepted, because (like that Fox News talking head recently said) you can’t see the germs, so how can they make you sick? Miasma (bad air) was the go-to reason for most urban diseases. Doctors just knew it was true, because that’s what their teachers and books told them. Likewise, they were slow in adopting the habit of *washing their hands* before delivering babies or conducting surgeries, thereby carelessly infecting their patients with dog-knows-what the doc had last put his hands into. Many mothers died of infection soon after giving birth, because their attending physician (or nurse or midwife) had failed to wash up first.

I’m quite sure one of my great-grandmothers died in this way, at age 24, just a few months after giving birth.