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Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Thomas Goetz
Started reading
May 21, 2017
In the last half of the nineteenth century, at least one-quarter of all deaths were due to tuberculosis,
Joseph Lister
the most famous physicians in Europe and a pioneer of the germ theory of disease,
tuberculosis often traveled under aliases. Manifest in the lungs, it was known as consumption or phthisis; on the skin, it was called scrofula or lupus; it could also appear in other organs and be mistaken for cancer.
in 1870 the average life span in Europe and the United States was about thirty-six years, compared to about eighty years today—don’t
In England circa 1870, twenty-two people out of a thousand died every year. This means that more than 2 percent of the population was dying off every year, a constant deduction in humanity and accretion of misery. Today, the death rate is about five per one thousand, which is to say, four times as many people were dying then than are now.
most of the resources that constitute modern medicine had not arrived by 1870,
A list of inventions from 1875 to 1900 serves as nothing less than an inventory of the toolbox for modern life: the telephone, the lightbulb, the phonograph, the fountain pen, the cash register, the dishwasher, the escalator, the vacuum cleaner, the modern bicycle, the internal combustion engine, the Kodak camera, the flashbulb, the X-ray machine, the radio, the tape recorder, the paper clip, the zipper, subways, electric power plants, and drinking straws. All these modern tools were invented in a burst of innovation unprecedented in human history.
Robert Koch, a medical doctor turned bacteriologist.
Though today Koch’s name is little known outside his native Germany or university microbiology departments, he was, in his day, the most celebrated scientist on earth.
he pursued the idea that many diseases are caused by germs and that those germs can be isolated and identified. Koch’s great nemesis would be tuberculosis; it was the province of hi...
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It’s not too much to say that, without Robert Koch, and without this encounter, there may never have been a Sherlock Holmes as we know him.
There is no inevitable path for science; every fact won is hard fought and is self-evident only in retrospect. On the cold frontiers of science, there are no inevitabilities, no simple answers. And there are no easy remedies.
Alexander von Humboldt, the Prussian naturalist who won worldwide fame studying the climate and geology of Latin America.
The German state was not officially unified until 1871, when Otto von Bismarck consolidated the German peoples into one nation.
