What he also didn’t realize was that he was giving new life to a dead idea: that apart from isolating people who were ill, you needed to do anything you could to slow the spread of a disease before you had drugs to help. “I was this emergency room doctor,” he said. “I didn’t know that people said all this stuff had been tried in 1918 and it hadn’t worked. I wasn’t rejecting anything. I just didn’t know any better.”
