ABSTRACT

It is considered naïve historiography to judge a story by its ending. Any attempt, by contrast, to write the history of modern medical bacteriology, suffers from a reverse problem in which the outset of a story has come to dominate its further development. We know a lot about the golden days of medical bacteriology between 1860 and 1900, 1 but we struggle when it comes to later developments. Attempting to discuss the history of medical thinking on infectious disease in relation to the development of medical microbiology, this chapter first sketches out the main lines in the history of that field, and then places more accent on developments after 1900.