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🌊 Ripple · counterfactual

What if Germ theory of disease had gone differently?

1865 · france

Pasteur and Lister establish that specific microbes cause specific diseases.

If it had gone differently: Doctors keep blaming bad air; surgery stays a death sentence and cities stay killing grounds.

What it set up
  1. 1740Europe's population boom, Without a surplus of hands and mouths, there is no cheap urban workforce waiting for the factories.
  2. 1858The sanitation revolution, Cities keep drinking their own waste; the urban death rate never falls and the great cities stay capped in size.
  3. 1928Penicillin, A scratch can still kill you; childbirth, surgery and pneumonia keep their old death rates.
  4. 1943Mass-produced antibiotics, Antibiotics stay rare and experimental for another two decades; infection keeps its old grip on surgery and childbirth.
  5. 1950The Green Revolution, Famine stays a normal feature of the late 20th century; populations in Asia and Latin America stall.
  6. 1953The structure of DNA, How life stores its instructions stays a mystery; molecular biology, genetic medicine and biotech never get started.

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