🌊 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
- 1740Europe's population boom, Without a surplus of hands and mouths, there is no cheap urban workforce waiting for the factories.
- 1858The sanitation revolution, Cities keep drinking their own waste; the urban death rate never falls and the great cities stay capped in size.
- 1928Penicillin, A scratch can still kill you; childbirth, surgery and pneumonia keep their old death rates.
- 1943Mass-produced antibiotics, Antibiotics stay rare and experimental for another two decades; infection keeps its old grip on surgery and childbirth.
- 1950The Green Revolution, Famine stays a normal feature of the late 20th century; populations in Asia and Latin America stall.
- 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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