April 11, 2020
FROM Exposing the Myth of Germ Theory by Arthur M. Baker, quoted here:
People have been educated to be terrified of bacteria and to believe implicitly in the idea of contagion: that specific, malevolently-aggressive disease germs pass from one host to another. They also have been programmed to believe that healing requires some powerful force to remove whatever is at fault. In their view, illness is hardly their own doing. The ‘germ era’ helped usher in the decline of hygienic health reform in the 19th century and, ironically, the people also found a soothing complacency in placing the blame for their ill health on malevolent, microscopic ‘invaders’, rather than facing responsibility for their own insalubrious lifestyle habits and their own suffering. Pasteur was a chemist and physicist and knew very little about biological processes. He was a respected, influential and charismatic man, however, whose phobic fear of infection and belief in the “malignancy and belligerence” of germs had popular far-reaching consequences in the scientific community which was convinced of the threat of the microbe to man. Thus was born the fear of germs (bacteriophobia), which still exists today. Before the discoveries of Pasteur, medical science was a disorganised medley of diversified diseases with imaginary causes, each treated symptomatically rather than at their root cause. Up to this time, the evolution of medical thought had its roots in ancient shamanism, superstition and religion, of invading entities and spirits.
The profession searched in vain for a tangible basis on which to base its theories and practices. Pasteur then gave the profession the “germ”. By the 1870s, the medical profession fully adopted the germ theory with a vengeance that continues today. The advent of the microscope made it possible to see, differentiate and categorise the organisms. Invading microbes were now seen as the cause of disease. The medical-pharmaceutical industry began their relentless search for the perfect drug to combat each disease-causing microbe—of which there are now over 10,000 distinct diseases recognised by the American Medical Association. The universal acceptance of the germ theory and widespread bacteriophobia resulted in frenzied efforts to avoid the threat of germs. A whole new era of modem medicine was then inaugurated, including sterilisation, pasteurisation, vaccination, and fear of eating raw food. It is frequently overlooked that around 1880, Pasteur changed his theory. According to Dr Duclaux, Pasteur stated that germs were “ordinarily kept within bounds by natural laws, but when conditions change, when its virulence is exalted, when its host is enfeebled, the germ is able to invade the territory which was previously barred to it.”
This is the premise that a healthy body is resistant and not susceptible to disease. With the advent of Pasteur’s mysterious germ, however, medicine cloaked itself under the guise of ‘science’ and ever since has succeeded in keeping the public ignorant of the true nature of dis- ease.