A popular account of the invisible world of microbes and their impact on mankind.

Five startling discoveries about how bacteria grow were recently made -- about 100 yr after they should have been made. Scientists back then misled themselves by not vetting out a new method for growing bacteria developed by a New Jersey woman while working in the Berlin lab of a soon-to-be Nobel Laureate. Oddly, he never used it. But everyone else did, and a faulty paradigm emerged from its use and is still in vogue today. The missed discoveries and faulty paradigm had little impact on the achievements of Science during the 20th Century but not so regarding those required in the 21st. The imbedded paradigm must be corrected if we are to effectively combat epidemics and bioterrorism. This is a true story told first hand of the discoveries and frustrations to correct this faulty paradigm.

A noted medical historian places recent outbreaks of deadly diseases in historical perspective, with accounts of other alarming and recurring diseases throughout history and of the ways in which humans have adapted. Reprint. 17,500 first printing.

Unlike some other reproductions of classic texts (1) We have not used OCR(Optical Character Recognition), as this leads to bad quality books with introduced typos. (2) In books where there are images such as portraits, maps, sketches etc We have endeavoured to keep the quality of these images, so they represent accurately the original artefact. Although occasionally there may be certain imperfections with these old texts, we feel they deserve to be made available for future generations to enjoy.