So Very Small: How Humans Discovered the Microcosmos, Defeated Germs--And May Still Lose the War Against Infectious Disease

'An elegant, wide-ranging history' (The New York Review of Books) of the centuries-long quest to discover the critical role of germs in disease thatreveals as much about human reasoning--and the pitfalls of ego--as it does about microbes. 'Levenson takes readers through an entertaining . . . journey of missed opportunities in microbiology and the eventual advances that arose in this field.'--Science Scientists and enthusiastic amateurs first confirmed the existence of living things invisible to the human eye in the late seventeenth century. So why did it take two centuries to connect microbes to disease? As late as the Civil War in the 1860s, most soldiers who perished died not on the battlefield but of infected wounds, typhoid, and other diseases. Twenty years later, the outcome might have been different, following one of the most radical intellectual transformations in history: germ theory, the recognition that the tiniest forms of life have been humankind's greatest killers. It was