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Germs

Germs are bacteria, sometimes virus or other disease-causing organisms, (as
in germ warfare). Not to be confused with the term from developmental
biology. One of the first people to question the presence of some kind of
disease causing substance was Ignaz Semmelweis, a Hungarian doctor,
practicing in an obstetrics ward in the 1840s. He discovered that the death
rate of the impoverished women attended by the nurse midwives was many times
less than that of the wealthier women attended by the doctors. His
observations led him to the conclusion, that it was a matter of cleanliness.
The doctors, on their schedules, went directly from the morgue to the
obstetrics ward and did not wash their hands. When he tried to present his
findings to his fellow doctors, they scorned him and laughed at him. They
couldn't believe in things they could not see! It wasn't until the 1880s and
the work of Louis Pasteur and Joseph Lister that the truth of germs finally
surfaced and was accepted by the scientific community.

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