| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 106.1

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 106.1 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Canada and the United States

Nancy Tomes. The Gospel of Germs: Men, Women, and the Microbe in American Life. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. 1998. Pp. xv, 351. $29.95.

At the end of the nineteenth century, Louis Pasteur, Robert Koch, and their disciples demonstrated that specific bacteria caused many infectious diseases. But how did their "germ theory" affect the lives of ordinary Americans? 1

In his 1926 classic Microbe Hunters, Paul De Kruif promoted the view that the bacteriologists' discoveries had conquered dreaded epidemics, produced the era's unprecedented extension of life expectancy, and replaced vague health superstitions with modern medical science. In reply, revisionist accounts such as Richard Brown's Rockefeller Medicine Men: Medicine and Capitalism in America (1979) turned the heroic story upside down. The revisionists blamed the germ theory for diverting medicine away from the real socioeconomic roots of disease; for reinforcing industrial capitalism, racism, and moralistic victim-blaming; and for promoting the power of male technical experts over formerly female domains from family life to social reform. Although they differed on whether it was a triumph or a disaster, both interpretations portrayed bacteriology as a dramatic revolution, the key paradigm shift in medical history. . . .

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