![]() Rosen’s ( The Third Horseman: Climate Change and the Great Famine of the 14th Century, 2014, etc.) warts-and-all sketches of the key figures serve as refreshing antidotes to the hero-worship texts we read as schoolchildren. There were some successes-antitoxin for diphtheria, a vaccine for anthrax-but competition and venomous rivalries prevailed, pitting Pasteur against Koch, France against Germany. But in the late 1800s came Louis Pasteur and Robert Koch, and suddenly the world knew that cholera, plague, tuberculosis, diphtheria, and other maladies were caused by invisible microbes: bacteria. A richly documented history of the rise-and threatened future-of antibiotics.īefore the invention of antibiotics, doctors practiced “heroic medicine,” rebalancing the body’s humors with bloodletting, blistering, purges, enemas, and other primitive techniques. ![]()
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