Then, in 1906, after Louis Pasteur and Robert Koch and Joseph Lister and others had persuasively established the involvement of microbes in infectious disease, an English doctor named W. H. Hamer made some interesting points about “smouldering” epidemics in a series of lectures to the Royal College of Physicians in London. Hamer was especially interested in why diseases such as influenza, diphtheria, and measles seem to mount into major outbreaks in a cyclical pattern—rising to a high case count, fading away, rising again after a certain interval of time. What seemed curious was that the
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