Pasteur had (also highly “counterfactual”) help I think! Ignaz Semmelweis worked in this maternity ward where the women & babies kept dying. The hospital had opened up some investigations over the years as to the cause of death but kept closing them with garbage explanations. He went somewhere else for a while and when he got back he noticed that the death numbers were down in his absence. Then he noticed his hands smelled like death after one of his routine autopsies and he was about to go plunge them in some poor mother! He had washed them but just with regular soap. If he put some bleach in the washwater then his hands didn’t stink. He connected the dots. He had killed hundreds of mothers & babies but wrote a book about it anyway and thereby popularized disinfection (and strongly suggested the root cause of disease).
Probably the main reason that germ theory took so long to work out is that the people with the right evidence were too guilty and ashamed to share it.
Pasteur had (also highly “counterfactual”) help I think! Ignaz Semmelweis worked in this maternity ward where the women & babies kept dying. The hospital had opened up some investigations over the years as to the cause of death but kept closing them with garbage explanations. He went somewhere else for a while and when he got back he noticed that the death numbers were down in his absence. Then he noticed his hands smelled like death after one of his routine autopsies and he was about to go plunge them in some poor mother! He had washed them but just with regular soap. If he put some bleach in the washwater then his hands didn’t stink. He connected the dots. He had killed hundreds of mothers & babies but wrote a book about it anyway and thereby popularized disinfection (and strongly suggested the root cause of disease).
Probably the main reason that germ theory took so long to work out is that the people with the right evidence were too guilty and ashamed to share it.