Word: contagia
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...1870s Louis Pasteur and Robert Koch showed that microscopic germs cause diseases like anthrax, rabies, tuberculosis. Sixty years later and with vastly improved microscopes, bacteriologists are unable to see any germ positively responsible for smallpox, measles, infantile paralysis, the common cold. That invisible, specific contagia cause these diseases and many an-other is certain. Medical scientists call those submicroscopic substances viruses. But they do not know their true nature, and hence cannot scientifically prevent common colds or infantile paralysis...
Primitive peoples believed that evil spirits carried diseases. Hebrews and Greeks proved that cleanliness protected them from many ailments. In the Middle Ages doctors ascribed to various invisible contagia the causes of diseases. In 1658 by means of a simple microscope Athanasius Kircher of Fulda, Germany, saw "worms" in the blood of people stricken with Black Plague. Those probably were the first germs ever noted. As microscopes were improved more kinds of animalcula were observed, and doctors gradually associated them with disease. But not until 1876 was a germ proved to be a cause of a disease. The disease: anthrax...
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