ABSTRACT
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. The emergence of medical microbiology has often been attributed to the rise of a germ theory of infectious disease. Nineteenth-century medical bacteriology had entailed a promise that identifying pathogens would offer opportunities for control. Where railways and telegraphs promised control of space and time, medicines implied in the bacteriological concept of infectious disease promised control of the biology of such conditions. In subsequent developments, attempts to align medical bacteriology and evolutionary biology, such as in Theobald Smith's 'law of declining virulence', remained without noticeable impact in the medicine of their times. Therapeutic interventions that had been entailed in the science of medical microbiology materialized as industrially mass-produced medicines.
