The Gospel of Germs

Men, Women, and the Microbe in American Life

Nancy Tomes

• Editorial: Harvard University Press
• Año: 1999
• ISBN:
  9780674257146
• Categoría: History
• Categoría: Science History

AIDS. Ebola. "Killer microbes." All around us the alarms are going off, warning of the danger of new, deadly diseases. And yet, as Nancy Tomes reminds us in her absorbing book, this is really nothing new. A remarkable work of medical and cultural history, The Gospel of Germs takes us back to the first great "germ panic" in American history, which peaked in the early 1900s, to explore the origins of our modern disease consciousness.Little more than a hundred years ago, ordinary Americans had no idea that many deadly ailments were the work of microorganisms, let alone that their own behavior spread such diseases. The Gospel of Germs shows how the revolutionary findings of late nineteenth-century bacteriology made their way from the laboratory to the lavatory and kitchen, with public health reformers spreading the word and women taking up the battle on the domestic front. Drawing on a wealth of advice books, patent applications, advertisements, and oral histories, Tomes traces the new awareness of the microbe as it radiated outward from middle-class homes into the world of American business and crossed the lines of class, gender, ethnicity, and race.Just as we take some of the weapons in this germ war for granted--fixtures as familiar as the white porcelain toilet, the window screen, the refrigerator, and the vacuum cleaner--so we rarely think of the drastic measures deployed against disease in the dangerous old days before antibiotics. But, as Tomes notes, many of the hygiene rules first popularized in those days remain the foundation of infectious disease control today. Her work offers a timely look into the history of our long-standing obsession with germs, its impact on twentieth-century culture and society, and its troubling new relevance to our own lives.

Notes

I have been highly selective in my references to the vast secondary literature concerning the history of the germ theory and its influence on American culture. Beyond citing those works that have most directly and deeply influenced my own thinking, I have sought primarily to direct the reader to a few of the most recent and comprehensive treatments of the many subjects I cover.

Abbreviations

AHS	Atlanta Lung Association Papers, Atlanta History Center, Atlanta, Georgia
ALA	Archives, American Lung Association, New York, New York
BHM	Bulletin of the History of Medicine
BJBSC	Bulletin of the Joint Board of Sanitary Control
BNTA	Bulletin of the National Tuberculosis Association
CHS	Chicago Historical Society, Chicago, Illinois
CPP	Historical Collections, College of Physicians of Philadelphia, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
CRCFW	Cornell Reading-Course for Farmers’ Wives
CSS	Community Service Society Papers, Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Columbia University, New York, New York
CU	Records, Office of the Dean, New York State College of Home Economics, Group 749, Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections, Cornell University Library, Ithaca, New York
CUE	Extension Records, New York State College of Home Economics, Group 919, Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections, Cornell University Library, Ithaca, New York
DC	R. G. Dun and Company Collection, Baker Library, Harvard University Graduate School of Business Administration, Cambridge, Massachusetts
GH	Good Housekeeping
GMM	George Meany Memorial Archives, Silver Spring, Maryland
HC	Trade Catalog Collection, Hagley Museum and Library, Wilmington, Delaware
HD	Records of the Du Pont Cellophane Company, Series 2, Part 2, Archives of the E. I. du Pont de Nemours and Company, Hagley Museum and Library, Wilmington, Delaware
HL	Theodore Roosevelt Collection, Houghton Library, Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts
HM	The Hotel Monthly
ILR	Collection 60, Union Health Center, International Ladies Garment Workers’ Union, Records, Kheel Center for Labor-Management Documentation and Archives, Cornell University, Ithaca, New York
JBSC	Joint Board of Sanitary Control
JHE	Journal of Home Economics
JHM	Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences
JOL	Journal of the Outdoor Life
JWT	J. Walter Thompson Company Archives, Special Collections Library, Duke University, Durham, North Carolina
KC	Oral Histories, Corinne Krause Collection, Library and Archives, Historical Society of Western Pennsylvania, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania
LHJ	Ladies’ Home Journal
NA	Record Group 42, Series 87, Correspondence and Other Records, Office of Public Buildings and Public Parks of the National Capital, National Archives, Washington, D.C.
NLM	Historical Division, National Library of Medicine, Bethesda, Maryland
NTA	National Tuberculosis Association
NU	Neighborhood Union Collection, Series 14-B, Special Collections and Archives, Atlanta University, Atlanta, Georgia
NYH	New York Herald
NYT	New York Times
PC	Department of History, Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.), Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
PO	United States Patent Office, Alexandria, Virginia
PSM	Popular Science Monthly
PSPT	Pennsylvania Society for the Prevention of Tuberculosis
SCH	School of Home Economics, Records, 1900–1972, Record Group 22.2, the College Archives, Simmons College, Boston, Massachusetts
SCP	School of Public Health Nursing, School of Nursing Records, 1902–1970, Record Group 22.1, the College Archives, Simmons College, Boston, Massachusetts
SE	Sanitary Engineer
SEP	Saturday Evening Post
TU	Tuskegee University Archives, Tuskegee, Alabama
UA	Central Labor Union Minutes, Records of Philadelphia Council, AFL-CIO, microfilm reels 1 and 2, Urban Archives, Temple University, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
UPA	University of Pennsylvania Archives, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
VP	Special Collections, University of Pennsylvania Library, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
WC	Warshaw Collection, Smithsonian Institution Archives Center, National Museum of American History, Washington, D.C.

Introduction

1. “Ann Landers,” Philadelphia Inquirer, Sept. 13, 1989, p. 2C.

2. For a compelling account of the fears experienced by people who act as “buddies” to AIDS patients, see Emily Martin, Flexible Bodies: Tracking Immunity in American Culture from the Days of Polio to the Age of AIDS (Boston: Beacon, 1994), pp. 135–139.

3. Germ-related beliefs and behaviors are good examples of what the sociologist Pierre Bourdieu refers to as “habitus,” that is, modes of thinking and acting that are acquired in childhood and rarely questioned in later life. See Pierre Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory of Practice (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1977), pp. 80–81.

4. For a classic account of traditional notions of contagion, see Daniel Defoe, A Journal of the Plague Year, ed. Louis Landa (1722; reprint, New York: Oxford University Press, 1969). On conceptions of atmospheric infection, see Alain Corbin, The Foul and the Fragrant: Odor and the French Social Imagination (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1986).

5. On how dirty most Americans were before the Civil War, see Suellen Hoy, Chasing Dirt: The American Pursuit of Cleanliness (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), pp. 3–16. Personal diaries and letters suggest how rarely ordinary Americans worried about catching diseases through casual contact with other people, even those who were obviously sick. See, for example, Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, A Midwife’s Tale: The Life of Martha Ballard, Based on Her Diary, 1785–1812 (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1990), pp. 40–46.

6. On gentility and the impulse toward certain kinds of cleanliness, see Richard L. Bushman, The Refinement of America: Persons, Houses, Cities (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1992); and John F. Kasson, Rudeness and Civility: Manners in Nineteenth-Century Urban America (New York: Hill and Wang, 1990).

7. On the changing views of consumption, see Sheila M. Rothman, Living in the Shadow of Death: Tuberculosis and the Social Experience of Illness in American History (New York: Basic Books, 1994).

8. Edward Trudeau, An Autobiography (New York: Doubleday Page, 1916), pp. 29–31.

9. Sherrill Redmon, “The Poisoned Wedding,” unpub. paper in the author’s possession.

10. On the death of the Lincolns’ son, see Jean Baker, Mary Todd Lincoln: A Biography (New York: Norton, 1987), pp. 208–209. On the English royal family’s encounters with typhoid, see Balthazar W. Foster, The Prince’s Illness: Its Lessons (London: J. & A. Churchill, 1872). See Chapter 1 for an account of Martha Roosevelt’s death from typhoid.

11. In this book, I confine my focus to forms of prevention that required substantial changes in individual and household behavior. I thus leave aside other important preventive strategies that emerged in this time period, including immunization programs and screening programs based on physical exams, diagnostic tests, X rays, and the like. In her valuable study of the press coverage of diphtheria, typhoid, and syphilis between 1870 and 1930, Terra Ziporyn provides a good overview of these contemporaneous developments. See Terra Ziporyn, Disease in the Popular American Press: The Case of Diphtheria, Typhoid Fever, and Syphilis, 1870–1920 (New York: Greenwood, 1988).

12. Frank Buffington Vrooman, “Public Health and National Defence,” The Arena 69 (Aug. 1895): 425–438, quotation from p. 425.

13. T. Mitchell Prudden, Dust and Its Dangers (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1890), pp. 93–94. On popular religious culture, see David D. Hall, Worlds of Wonder, Days of Judgment (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1990). The Puritan minister Cotton Mather used the phrase “invisible world” to refer to the supernatural workings of Satan and his agents during the celebrated 1692 witchcraft outbreak in Salem Village. See Cotton Mather, The Wonders of the Invisible World (Boston, Mass.: Benjamin Harris, 1693).

14. William Gilman Thompson, “The Present Aspect of Medical Education,” PSM 27 (1885): 589–595, quotation from p. 590; H. G. Wells, “The War of the Worlds,” The Works of H. G. Wells, vol. 3 (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1924), pp. 207–492; the description of the bacteria’s triumph is on pp. 436–437. Comparisons between “primitive” and “modern” views were commonplace in science writing at that time. See John Burnham, How Superstition Won and Science Lost: Popularizing Science and Health in the United States (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1987).

15. My conception of the different versions of the germ theory has been influenced by the work of Gerald Geison on Pasteur and Christopher Lawrence and Richard Dixey on Lister. See Gerald L. Geison, The Private Science of Louis Pasteur (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1995); and Christopher Lawrence and Richard Dixey, “Practising on Principle: Joseph Lister and the Germ Theories of Disease,” in Medical Theory, Surgical Practice: Studies in the History of Surgery, ed. Christopher Lawrence (New York: Routledge, 1992), pp. 153–215.

16. Ellen Richards quoted in Laura Shapiro, Perfection Salad: Women and Cooking at the Turn of the Century (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1986), p. 181.

17. See Abraham Benenson, ed., Control of Communicable Diseases in Man: An Official Report of the American Public Health Association, 15th ed. (Washington, D.C.: APHA, 1990).

18. These various literatures are cited at more appropriate places in the text. Among the few sources I found that tried to address the more collective conception of the germ as it developed in the United States was Andrew McClary, “Germs Are Everywhere: The Germ Threat as Seen in Magazine Articles, 1890–1920,” Journal of American Culture 3 (1980): 33–46. I also found inspiration in Bruno Latour, The Pasteurizati...