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those that make it a marvel that anyone could possibly survive three
days in an atmosphere consisting mainly of countless pathogenic
germs. They conceive microbes as immortal until slain by a germicide
administered by a duly qualified medical man. All through Europe people
are adjured, by public notices and even under legal penalties, not to
throw their microbes into the sunshine, but to collect them carefully in
a handkerchief; shield the handkerchief from the sun in the darkness
and warmth of the pocket; and send it to a laundry to be mixed up with
everybody else's handkerchiefs, with results only too familiar to local
health authorities.

In the first frenzy of microbe killing, surgical instruments were dipped
in carbolic oil, which was a great improvement on not dipping them in
anything at all and simply using them dirty; but as microbes are so fond
of carbolic oil that they swarm in it, it was not a success from the
anti-microbe point of view. Formalin was squirted into the circulation
of consumptives until it was discovered that formalin nourishes the
tubercle bacillus handsomely and kills men. The popular theory of
disease is the common medical theory: namely, that every disease had
its microbe duly created in the garden of Eden, and has been steadily
propagating itself and producing widening circles of malignant disease
ever since. It was plain from the first that if this had been even
approximately true, the whole human race would have been wiped out by
the plague long ago, and that every epidemic, instead of fading out as
mysteriously as it rushed in, would spread over the whole world. It was
also evident that the characteristic microbe of a disease might be a
symptom instead of a cause. An unpunctual man is always in a hurry;
but it does not follow that hurry is the cause of unpunctuality: on the
contrary, what is the matter with the patient is sloth. When Florence
Nightingale said bluntly that if you overcrowded your soldiers in dirty
quarters there would be an outbreak of smallpox among them, she was
snubbed as an ignorant female who did not know that smallpox can be
produced only by the importation of its specific microbe.

If this was the line taken about smallpox, the microbe of which
has never yet been run down and exposed under the microscope by the
bacteriologist, what must have been the ardor of conviction as to
tuberculosis, tetanus, enteric fever, Maltese fever, diphtheria, and
the rest of the