Topic 7 - Ideas about the cause of disease in the 18th and 19th century

Question 1

What was a quack?

Answer 1

Quacks were untrained medical men who sought to make a profit by selling old-fashioned medical treatments

Question 2

List 3 ideas from previous eras that quacks continued to use in the 18th century

Answer 2

1. The theory of the four humours
2. Examining urine to determine illness
3. Blaming miasmas for causing disease

Question 3

What explanations of disease and illness changed in the 18th century? give one example

Answer 3

More people started to see that lifestyle could be the cause of diseases, as opposed to diseases being inherited
e.g. illnesses such as gout were suspected to be because of overindulgent lifestyles

Question 4

Who was Louis Pasteur and what problem was he asked to resolve in 1857?

Answer 4

He was a French chemist and he was asked, by a local wine producer, to discover why his wine kept going sour during storage

Question 5

While investigating the local wine producers problem, what did Pasteur discover?

Answer 5

• He found that the wine was going sour because it was being exposed to germs in the air
• He found that the germs were killed by heating the wine up but the germs soon come back
• He found that healing and sealing the liquid prevented the wine from going sour

Question 6

Before Pasteurs germ theory, where did people believe germs came from?

Answer 6

Spontaneous generation - It was generally believed that germs were created in the body by disease

Question 7

What invention made Pasteur’s discovery of the germ theory possible and why was this invention so useful?

Answer 7

The microscope: It was useful because you could see/prove that germs existed in the air

Question 8

What influence did Pasteurs germ theory have in Britain? (use examples)

Answer 8

• people could now see the link between germs and disease and started to disregard other theories e.g. Joseph Lister
• Cleanliness was realised to be incredibly important to maintaining good health

Question 9

Why was progress with the germ theory slow?

Answer 9

Because each disease causing germ had to be researched individually

Question 10

What were the two main contributing factors that led to Kochs discoveries about disease?

Answer 10

1. The work of Pasteur

2. New technology e.g. industrial dyes and microscopes helped him see microbes

Question 11

What link did Koch discover between germs and disease and what experiments did he use to prove it?

Answer 11

• Kock discovered that certain germs were responsible for certain diseases
• Experiment: He collected one type of germ microbe from a solution and injected them into mice, to find that they all developed the same kind of disease

Question 12

What main influence did Koch have upon medicine in Britain?

Answer 12

He inspired a young generation of ‘microbe hunters’ to discover and identify germs responsible for specific diseases