The place of African belief and germ theory on the causes of human diseases

This study looks into the African belief about the mystical causes of diseases and the tenets of Western germ theory. Despite widespread Western medical practices, African people still strongly believe in the mystical causes of diseases. This reveals that as far as the African traditional belief is concerned, Western germ theory cannot satisfy the African belief in the causes of diseases. This is as a result of some of the diseases defying Western healing. The study adopts a qualitative phenomenological research design and descriptive method for data analysis. Personal interview forms a primary source of data collection while the secondary source includes library resources. The study observes that some mystical agents in African cosmology, such as witches and sorcerers, ogbanje, and breaking of taboos are responsible for untimely deaths, infliction of diseases to humankind and other related ailments which are believed to be traditional in nature.Intradisciplinary and/or interdisciplinary implications: The study recommends that hospitals and healthcare centres, within and outside Africa, should take into consideration the mystical agents as well as the pathogenic agents for good and efficient healing.

Disinfectants: Use of Different Types of Sanitization Techniques in 18th and 19th Centuries Britain and India

The article focuses on the use of different kinds of disinfectants used for sanitization and cleaning of public and private places for curbing the spread of diseases from one place to another. Multiple methods were employed for disinfection; some of which are easily accessible to the common people while others were particularly used in infirmaries and hospitals at the time of treatment. The article also shows that disinfectants were supplement to medicine and they target limiting of the contagion to a space whereas medicines were given for the treatment of patients. Historically, the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries witnessed unprecedented development in the field of chemistry which led to the discoveries of different types of antiseptic solutions and disinfectants apparently endorsed by the germ theory. Image Credit: Wellcome Library, London. Wellcome Images [email protected] http://wellcomeimages.org

The Most Important Thing That Ever Happened: Big, Bad Data and the Doubling of Human Life Expectancy

The global doubling of human life expectancy between 1850 and 1950 is arguably the most important thing that ever happened, undergirding massive improvements in human life and lifestyles while also contributing to insectageddons, septic oceans, and collapsing ecosystems. The story of that global doubling is typically told as a series of medical breakthroughs—Jenner and vaccination, Lister and antisepsis, Snow and germ theory, and Fleming and penicillin—but the lion’s share of the credit belongs to urban planning based upon good data. Until we had sophisticated systems of death registration, we could not conceive of the health problems we were facing, much less solve them. Today, the greatest threat we face is not disease but data denial.

Vulgarly Called The Throat-Distemper: New Jersey’s Two-Century Struggle Against Diphtheria

In 1740, minister and physician Jonathan Dickinson of Elizabethtown, New Jersey, published “Observations on that Terrible Disease Vulgarly Called the Throat-Distemper,” a short treatise on the diagnosis and treatment of epidemic diphtheria for the benefit of physicians in Boston. Dickinson’s pamphlet was a landmark in American colonial medical literature. It was New Jersey’s first—and last—important original contribution to the medical literature on diphtheria. For the next two centuries, New Jersey, with no medical colleges or prestigious teaching hospitals of its own, would import the medical knowledge and innovations necessary to control and finally eradicate the disease that cruelly killed thousands of New Jersey children in the two centuries following Dickinson’s report. This article examines the processes by which New Jersey practitioners and public health officers imported, processed, disseminated, and applied the lessons of the germ theory and immunology in their two-century quest to banish one of the great scourges of childhood.

Antimicrobial resistance: Transdisciplinary research on humans, antimicrobials and microbes

Calls for action on antimicrobial resistance (AMR) have existed almost as early as the discovery of penicillin and the sulpha drugs. Since then solutions to AMR have circled around the development of new antimicrobials and the rationalisation of their use via various configurations of regulation of access and distribution, promotion of diagnostics and education of prescribers and consumers. Research by historians and social scientists (HSS) are increasingly demonstrating the various limitations and unintended consequences of many of these approaches, while also seeking to propose not only different ways to study AMR as a problem, but also address it. Part of this, involves serious engagement with microbiological insights (i.e. related to the microbiome) and methods to move beyond the impasses of outdated concepts (e.g. germ theory), methodological reductionism and disciplinary boundaries. Based on our empirical research on AMR and human microbiome science, we demonstrate how AMR is a transdisciplinary problem requiring contributions from HSS’s research and expertise in order to devise socially meaningful and microbiologically effective solutions. We have identified four areas where such contributions would be beneficial: (1) policies (e.g. AMR policies still assume germ theory and operate within silos); (2) AMR solutions are human centred (i.e. neglect of the microbiome and pay limited attention to other nonhumans) vs one health; (3) epidemiological variables and microbiological discourse (i.e. often employ outdated anthropological and philosophical concepts, such as westernised, modern, traditional); (4) Rhetorics and lexicon (i.e. can be morally and conceptually simplistic, like ‘war’, ‘sweets’, ‘good’/’bad’ bugs, ‘irrational’).