Thomas Levenson > Quotes

“This Saturday, Galle and a volunteer assistant, Heinrich Ludwig d’Arrest, command the main telescope. Galle stands at the eyepiece and guides the instrument, pointing toward Capricorn. As each star comes into view, he calls out its brightness and position. D’Arrest pores over a sky map, ticking off each candidate as it reveals itself as a familiar object. So it goes until, sometime between midnight and 1 A.M., Galle reels out the numbers for one more mote of light invisible to the naked eye: right ascension 21 h, 53 min, 25.84 seconds. D’Arrest glances down at the chart, then yelps: “that star is not on the map!” The younger man runs to fetch the observatory’s director, who earlier that day had only reluctantly given his permission to attempt what he seems to have thought a fool’s errand. Together, the trio continue to watch the new object until it sets at around 2:30 in the morning. True stars remain mere points in even the most powerful telescopes. This does not, showing instead an unmistakable disk, a full 3.2 arcseconds across—just as Le Verrier had told them to expect. That visible circle can mean just one thing: Galle has just become the first man to see what he knows to be a previously undiscovered planet, one that would come to be called Neptune, just about exactly where Urbain-Jean-Joseph Le Verrier told him to look. —”
― Thomas Levenson, The Hunt for Vulcan: . . . And How Albert Einstein Destroyed a Planet, Discovered Relativity, and Deciphered the Universe

“... there’s a common trick nature plays on its would-be investigators: resemblance, the human urge to map the unknown onto the already known, can be a snare. Just because something looks like something else doesn’t mean that the backstory for both must be the same. Rocks scattered across the sky may appear to be a rubble field left behind by an explosion…but unless you stop to think how else you might get there, you rely on assumptions not in evidence.”
― Thomas Levenson, The Hunt for Vulcan: ...And How Albert Einstein Destroyed a Planet, Discovered Relativity, and Deciphered the Universe

“The enterprise of making sense of the material world turns on a key question: what happens when something observed in nature doesn’t fit within the established framework of existing human knowledge?”
― Thomas Levenson, The Hunt for Vulcan: . . . And How Albert Einstein Destroyed a Planet, Discovered Relativity, and Deciphered the Universe

“Le Verrier left the solar system larger than he found it - one both better and less completely understood.”
― Thomas Levenson, The Hunt for Vulcan: ...And How Albert Einstein Destroyed a Planet, Discovered Relativity, and Deciphered the Universe

“But now, in the daily business of our warped cosmos, Vulcan barley registers, even as an antiquarian curiosity. Only a few have some vague memory of the story – mostly physicists and astronomers with a historical bent. For them, Vulcan is a cautionary tale: it’s so damn easy to see what one wants or expects to find.”
― Thomas Levenson, The Hunt for Vulcan: ...And How Albert Einstein Destroyed a Planet, Discovered Relativity, and Deciphered the Universe

“As Vulcan’s troublesome history reveals, no one gives up on a powerful, or a beautiful, or perhaps simply a familiar and useful conception of the world without utter compulsion – and a real alternative.”
― Thomas Levenson, The Hunt for Vulcan: ...And How Albert Einstein Destroyed a Planet, Discovered Relativity, and Deciphered the Universe

“Vulcan is long gone, almost completely forgotten. It may seem today to be merely a curiosity, just another mistake our ancestors made, about which we now know better. But the issue of what to do with failure in science was tricky right at the start of the Scientific Revolution, and it remains so now. We may—we do—know more than the folks back then. But we are not thus somehow immune to the habits of mind, the leaps of imagination, or the capacity for error that they possessed. Vulcan’s biography is one of the human capacity to both discover and self-deceive. It offers a glimpse of how hard it is to make sense of the natural world, and how difficult it is for any of us to unlearn the things we think are so, but aren’t.”
― Thomas Levenson, The Hunt for Vulcan: . . . And How Albert Einstein Destroyed a Planet, Discovered Relativity, and Deciphered the Universe

“As he deployed his forces, Newton imposed the same empirical rigor on his new job as he had with his pendulums and prisms. The Mint could not operate any faster than his men could spin their capstans, and every other step had to be timed to match the work of his presses. So Newton watched to “judge of the workmen’s diligence.” He saw how quickly the brutal effort needed to turn the press wore out its team. He observed just how nimble the man loading blanks and pulling finished coins from the press had to be to keep his fingers. Eventually, he identified the perfect pace: if the press thumped just slightly slower than the human heart, striking fifty to fifty-five times a minute, men and machines could stamp out coins for hours at a time. By autumn, Newton had the Mint’s output up to £100,000 every working week—a century ahead of Adam Smith, and more than double again before Henry Ford showed the world just how powerful time-and-motion rigor could be. Newton continued to drive his horses and men for the next two and a half years until the nation’s entire silver money supply had been remade. In all, under his command, the Mint recoined over £6 million—£6,722,970 0s. 2d., to be exact. As that last tuppence indicates, Newton, having spent the whole of his prior life as an essentially solitary thinker, proved to be a truly extraordinary administrator, bringing the effort home with accounts accurate to the penny and stunningly free of corruption.”
― Thomas Levenson, Money For Nothing: The South Sea Bubble and the Invention of Modern Capitalism

“As late as 1742, London hatters beat to death a man who dared shape headgear without having gone through the apprentice system.”
― Thomas Levenson, Newton and the Counterfeiter: The Unknown Detective Career of the World's Greatest Scientist

“Leeuwenhoek never saw Y. pestis itself. Throughout his long life, Delft was lucky enough to dodge the plague, and in any event this microbe was too small, at or below what even his most powerful microscopes could resolve. But once he had shown that human beings and animalcules shared living quarters, the inference was there to be made. It would have taken a speculative mind, and a daring one, but some observers of London’s plagues had both qualities and had wondered aloud about less obvious possibilities. Yet that crucial connection remained out of reach for years, decades, for a full two centuries. The idea wasn’t unthinkable even while Leeuwenhoek was still alive. But the proof and general acceptance of germ theory, the realization that microbes cause many of the maladies that humans suffer, would emerge only in the 1870s, almost exactly two hundred years after Leeuwenhoek’s first letters to the Royal Society.”
― Thomas Levenson, So Very Small: How Humans Discovered the Microcosmos, Defeated Germs--and May Still Lose the War Against Infectious Disease

“Semmelweis had found nothing that could plausibly explain the catastrophic results in Ward 1—his own workplace. “Everything was in question; everything seemed inexplicable,” he wrote. “Only the large number of deaths was an unquestionable reality.” Flummoxed, the young doctor—still only three years out of medical school—took a break. In March 1847, he left for a holiday in Venice. He returned two and a half weeks later, with, he reported, “rejuvenated vigor.” That’s when he learned that one of his favorite teachers, the pathologist Jakob Kolletschka, had died. Semmelweis wanted to know how this previously healthy man had gone so swiftly, so over the next few days he retraced the sequence of events that ended in Kolletschka’s death. It had started in the autopsy room. Assisted by students, Kolletschka was dissecting a cadaver. One of them nicked his professor’s finger with a surgical knife. The wound became inflamed, affecting nearby veins. Whatever was happening at the site of the injury kept on moving, traveling from the skin into other organs. When Kolletschka’s corpse was itself examined, the full extent of the damage became clear: his final illness had invaded his heart, the abdomen, his lungs, the membrane around his brain, even erupting in one eye. The scene within that body’s open cavity would have been grotesque, and grimly familiar. “I could see clearly,” Semmelweis recalled, that what had killed his mentor “was identical to that from which so many maternity patients died.”
― Thomas Levenson, So Very Small: How Humans Discovered the Microcosmos, Defeated Germs--and May Still Lose the War Against Infectious Disease

“THERE HE REMAINED for almost two years, cut off from every other scholar or mathematician. The isolation suited him. “In those days,” he would recall half a century later, “I was in the prime of my age for invention & minded Mathematics & Philosophy more than at any time since.”
― Thomas Levenson, Money For Nothing: The South Sea Bubble and the Invention of Modern Capitalism

“What moral to draw, then, of the nonexistence of an innermost planet and the universal triumph of general relativity? At least this: Science is unique among human ways of knowing because it is self-correcting. Every claim is provisional, which is to say each is incomplete in some small or, occasionally, truly consequential way. But in the midst of the fray, it is impossible to be sure what any gap between knowledge and nature might mean. We know now that Vulcan could never have existed; Einstein has shown us so. But no route to such certainty existed for Le Verrier, nor for any of his successors over the next half century. They lacked not facts, but a framework, some alternate way of seeing through which Vulcan's absence could be understood.”
― Thomas Levenson, The Hunt for Vulcan: ...And How Albert Einstein Destroyed a Planet, Discovered Relativity, and Deciphered the Universe

“We know that Mather read Timonius’s account, because in 1716 he sent a note to the Royal Society’s secretary offering support for his claims. He had heard of inoculation before reading that paper, he wrote, thanks to his own “servant”—a slave named Onesimus, a Berber tribesman from the south of Libya. “Enquiring of my Negro-man Onesimus, who is a pretty Intelligent Fellow,” if he’d had smallpox, “he answered both Yes, and, No.” Onesimus told Mather that the inoculation he’d received in his home country before being sold across the Atlantic “had given him something of the Small-Pox,” but that “whoever had the Courage to use it was forever free of the contagion.” Such direct testimony (which Mather corroborated with accounts from other Africans and slave traders), bolstered by the authority of the society’s learned observers, gave Mather a plan of action: “If I should live to see the Small-Pox again enter into our City” he wrote, he would try “to Introduce a Practice, which may be of so very happy a tendency.”
― Thomas Levenson, So Very Small: How Humans Discovered the Microcosmos, Defeated Germs--and May Still Lose the War Against Infectious Disease

“The duel never took place, as Virchow managed to reduce Bismarck’s bluster to absurdity. There are various versions about exactly what happened, but in one popular account, Virchow received the challenge as he was in his laboratory, investigating a roundworm implicated in the parasitic disease trichinosis. So, as Edward Walter and Mike Scott pick up the story, “As the challenged party, Virchow was entitled to the choice of weapons. He selected two externally identical cooked sausages one of which was edible and the other filled with deadly trichinae. Bismarck refused to accept the duel and Virchow’s honour remained intact; a case of Bismarck fearing the wurst.”
― Thomas Levenson, So Very Small: How Humans Discovered the Microcosmos, Defeated Germs--and May Still Lose the War Against Infectious Disease

“Boylston agreed to make the experiment. On June 26 he inoculated his six-year-old son Thomas, as well as a thirty-six-year-old man named Jack and a toddler named Jackey, both Black slaves. Jack had few symptoms and speedily recovered. (Boylston speculated that he might previously have had smallpox and thus already possessed immunity.) The younger patients traveled a rougher road. On the seventh day, Boylston reported, “the two children were a little hot, dull and sleepy.” Thomas twitched in his sleep, and in both boys, symptoms persisted, “neither the fever nor the symptoms abating,” until the ninth day, when each developed about one hundred pocks, “after which their Circumstances became easy, our Trouble was over, and they soon were well.” Both Boylston and Mather saw this outcome as a triumph, a clear demonstration of the value of inoculation. It was (in Mather’s framework) literally a godsend, a simple technique that could save hundreds, perhaps thousands. — Those multitudes would not be saved. Almost all of Boston’s medical community opposed the practice. Responding to news of Boylston’s inoculations, Boston’s selectmen heard testimony on July 21 from a French physician visiting Boston who told them in gruesome detail about an earlier experiment gone very wrong; four out of the thirteen inoculated patients had died, he claimed, while six others suffered severe reactions. Following that testimony, local doctors publicly declared that “infusing such malignant Filth [the inoculating pus] in the Mass of Blood is to corrupt and putrify it”; that “it has prov’d to be the Death of many Persons soon after the Operation”; and that “continuing the Operation among us is likely to prove of most dangerous Consequence.” The argument continued through and after the outbreak, featuring all the extravagant vitriol of which the era was capable. The doctors did not suggest that inoculation thwarted God’s will, but the hot fury of their opposition to inoculation echoed the theological view: Mather and Boylston were guilty of the sin of pride, meddling in matters beyond their grasp, and putting those they treated at intolerable risk.”
― Thomas Levenson, So Very Small: How Humans Discovered the Microcosmos, Defeated Germs--and May Still Lose the War Against Infectious Disease

“An unsigned polemic in the leading medical journal, The Lancet, accused Snow of committing “perverse, crotchety, or treasonable behavior” for arguing that cholera was a waterborne contagious disease and not the product of the general noxiousness of London’s streets and sewers. Snow earned The Lancet’s ire by testifying to a parliamentary committee that mere nasty smells are not the source of fatal disease, but that “every case of cholera…is caused by swallowing the excrementitious matter voided by cholera patients.” But, the Lancet writers argued, it was common knowledge that the emanations from decaying matter produce “failing strength…lassitude of body and torpidity of mind.” Disease as a category was produced by the ferment of dead and decaying matter detectable in the foul smells of sewage and rotting carcasses. Against all this medical experience, Snow merely had a theory, that “the law of propagation of cholera is the drinking of sewage water”—and, as the piece came to rest with seemingly no sense of irony, “we all know theory is often more despotic than reason.”
― Thomas Levenson, So Very Small: How Humans Discovered the Microcosmos, Defeated Germs--and May Still Lose the War Against Infectious Disease

“Where do living things come from? This was an old question, usually framed as the issue of spontaneous generation: Could new organisms emerge out of inert matter, the mere stuff of the earth? Aristotle, that intellectual omnivore, had thought so. He divided the living world into those animals and plants with offspring that come from seed or sexual reproduction, and those in whom the next of their kind emerged from inert matter—most often rotting waste, putrefying matter, or, simply, shit. Among those, perhaps the iconic example of the spontaneous generation of life were those sinuous fish, the eels, which, Aristotle wrote, “originate in what are called the entrails of the earth, which are found spontaneously in mud and moist earth.” — Eels would be evoked as a clear example of spontaneous generation for the next two millennia—in popular accounts as well as learned ones.”
― Thomas Levenson, So Very Small: How Humans Discovered the Microcosmos, Defeated Germs--and May Still Lose the War Against Infectious Disease

“But there was one disease that would have been unfamiliar to almost all the English in Calcutta. In most years, it accounted for only a small fraction of deaths—1 percent or so—both for the locals and for the tiny fraction of Europeans in the city. Its symptoms were unmistakable: loose, watery, relentless diarrhea; nausea and vomiting; thirst; muscle cramps; then toward the end, extreme dehydration. Between a quarter and a half of those who fell ill would die, often only hours after they first started to feel uncomfortable. Until the nineteenth century, it troubled just one corner of the world. Cholera was regularly present in the Ganges Valley, and would occasionally erupt in other regions in India—but it was largely unknown beyond that endemic range.”
― Thomas Levenson, So Very Small: How Humans Discovered the Microcosmos, Defeated Germs--and May Still Lose the War Against Infectious Disease

“Our bodies are not just our own, that is. We share them with literally trillions of microbes, and beyond the boundary line of our skin, our planet belongs more to bacteria than to us. Brute force, the metaphor of a war against infection, is inadequate to the task of surviving the facts of evolution. We are fortunate, though. Ideas as well as organisms can evolve. There is no doubt that our distinct qualities of mind and hand have molded the relationship between us and those fellow creatures Leeuwenhoek brought into view. We were clever enough to react decisively to COVID in less than a year, remember, for all that the response faltered in the United States and around the world. Still, we know that what is possible is not what is necessarily likely to happen next time, and the time after that. We can choose to believe we will always hold the upper hand. Or we can act in anticipation of such dangers in ways that recognize that microbes get a vote, too. That suggests all kinds of practical action to be undertaken: rebuilding public-health systems, monitoring disease reservoirs, pursuing the basic science that leads to more precise and powerful responses to microbial threats. But achieving the ends we aim for starts with recognizing that we are always and everywhere both actors and acted upon. We live not above the living world, but in it.”
― Thomas Levenson, So Very Small: How Humans Discovered the Microcosmos, Defeated Germs--and May Still Lose the War Against Infectious Disease

“Puerperal fever, the most prolific and terrifying of diseases to cut down women in their prime, had been known since antiquity, but it became an epidemic illness only with the professionalization of medicine in Europe. In the fifty years preceding this one unknown woman’s death, a handful of medical men had figured out how to save mothers like her, a result that anticipated a general theory of disease. Why didn’t that discovery save Magoun’s patient…and so many others? The answer, or a large part of it, turns not on the difficulty of science involved but on the assumptions and fundamental beliefs that kept those who could have but failed to save countless lives.”
― Thomas Levenson, So Very Small: How Humans Discovered the Microcosmos, Defeated Germs--and May Still Lose the War Against Infectious Disease

“Here’s where the “why” question enters. Why are we in this predicament? — An answer—not the whole of it, but a significant part—can be found by looking back to where this book began. In the first decades after microscopic life was first observed, bacteria and the rest of Leeuwenhoek’s bestiary amazed and amused the growing audience for natural wonders, but they did not impinge on that audience’s view of the order of nature. The Great Chain of Being was even then an old trope, and as natural philosophers extended the rule of number, weight, and measure to more and more of the world, its explicit narrative fell away. But the assumptions that animated the idea did not. The belief that humanity exists at some remove—above—the rest of the living world persisted. Adam and Eve’s children are creation’s actors, permitted, even required, to turn nature to our own ends. Germ theory could have generated an alternate view. Koch’s signature move—harvesting a microbe from a sick animal, growing it in pure culture, and then reintroducing it into an animal that then developed the original disease—demonstrated that the natural world does indeed impinge upon humankind: microbes matter. No more Great Chain then, no ladder, but rather Darwin’s recognition of “grandeur in this view of life”—of the world as a weave of interactions between living forms. However, that’s not what emerged from the initial germ-theory synthesis. There was no pause for wonder at the interconnections that bind together our biosphere at every scale. Instead, the central pillar of the new conception of disease drove Pasteur’s pursuit of vaccines; it animated Ehrlich in his search for the first antimicrobial chemical therapy; and ever since, it has driven the development of effective ways to prevent or treat infectious diseases, viral, microbial, and more. Find out how a pathogen works and then use the extraordinary capacity of humans for invention to block that bug from doing its worst. It was an undeniably effective way of thinking and researching. It is valuable still. But within it an old assumption persists: that humans uniquely hold the ability to act upon nature, and not be acted on.”
― Thomas Levenson, So Very Small: How Humans Discovered the Microcosmos, Defeated Germs--and May Still Lose the War Against Infectious Disease

“Mather was almost but not quite alone in such speculation. His musings may have been prompted by an English medical thinker, Benjamin Marten, who a year before Boston’s smallpox epidemic had suggested that certain diseases might be caused by “some certain species of Animalcula…that by their peculiar Shape or disagreeable parts, are inimical to our nature.” Marten was bold enough to take the next step in what may be the first explicit proposal of a microbial explanation for a specific disease, writing that “I do verily believe that it may easily be proved that Animalcula are much more probably the true and direct cause of the Plague…than whatever else has or can be conjectur’d.” Mather had read Marten and referred to his speculation in support of his own more sweeping claim that Leeuwenhoek’s tiny creatures might be implicated in a wide range of ailments.”
― Thomas Levenson, So Very Small: How Humans Discovered the Microcosmos, Defeated Germs--and May Still Lose the War Against Infectious Disease

“Leeuwenhoek lived to a grand old age—a full four score and ten, well over the Psalmist’s promise—sharing his body with its bustling community of animalcules. Throughout his long career as probably the world’s first full-time microscopist, he remained curious and became increasingly systematic in his choice of subjects and in his interpretations of what he saw. As his mastery grew over his instrument and the worldscapes it revealed, he far exceeded his roots as a clever craftsman. Rather, he became a proto-biologist, capable of interpreting what he saw—most notably in his ahead-of-its-time rejection of the claim that life could spontaneously emerge from inert matter. And yet for all his skill and accumulating knowledge of the microworld, he never made, or even imagined, a connection between those microbes and the experience of sickness and health. Nor did his correspondents. London’s epidemic of plague was still recent memory. Oldenburg was gone, but Wren was still there; so were Boyle and the society’s preeminent microscopist, Robert Hooke. It’s impossible to be certain of what causes inaction—why a road isn’t taken, or an idea goes unthought. But the near intersection of 1665’s Great Plague, the discovery of microscopic life, and the virtuosos’ urgent passion for material explanations prompts the question: Why didn’t any of the actors in Delft or London even tentatively suggest a connection between Leeuwenhoek’s animalcules and human suffering?”
― Thomas Levenson, So Very Small: How Humans Discovered the Microcosmos, Defeated Germs--and May Still Lose the War Against Infectious Disease

“Once again, Snow created a map showing where the two companies operated. It drew his readers’ attention to a district they both served, where the two shades of gray (blue and red in the original) overlap. In this grayscale version of Snow’s color map, the area served by the Southwark and Vauxhall Company is in the darker gray. The Lambeth Company’s territory is in the slighlty lighter gray. The darkest patches are where the two companies overlapped. For a transcript of the text in this image, go to this page. Everyone living in that area experienced the same conditions, except the source of their water. “Each company supplies both rich and poor, both large houses and small,” he wrote. “There is no difference either in the condition or occupation of the persons receiving the water of the different Companies.” Snow then matched this map to a detailed reconstruction of the path of cholera through the district. Those drinking Southwark and Vauxhall water were six times as likely to die of cholera as the Lambeth Company’s customers. This was, Snow said, “the most satisfactory proof of the truth or fallacy” of his cholera theory—in his view, it was more powerful, more convincing, than the Broad Street story. It is certainly persuasive now, in hindsight, when we know that Snow was right, and why. In the moment, though, it failed to persuade the audience Snow most hoped to reach: London’s medical establishment.”
― Thomas Levenson, So Very Small: How Humans Discovered the Microcosmos, Defeated Germs--and May Still Lose the War Against Infectious Disease

“Snow was a storyteller as well as a scientist, so he deployed anecdotes to put faces to his number in the hope of persuading his medical colleagues of cholera’s waterborne spread. There was a woman, “the widow of a percussion-cap maker,” who had moved from Soho to the West End some months earlier but had not lost her taste for Broad Street’s water. She had arranged for bottles of it to be brought to her by cart. There was a delivery on August 31. She drank from it then and the next day, and she shared it with a niece who lived in Islington, another district still untouched by cholera. Both died. Seven workmen making dentists’ materials at numbers 8 and 9 Broad Street were “in the habit of drinking water from the pump, generally drinking about half-a-pint once or twice a day.” Cholera killed them all—but two people who lived in the same building who did not draw their water from the pump experienced only bouts of diarrhea. Both lived. A factory at 37 Broad Street provided its workers with barrels of pump water and lost eighteen out of a staff of two hundred. A brewery down the road gave its seventy men malt liquor; no one drank water; none fell ill. Tellingly, the Broad Street outbreak did not single out the abject poor. Rather, Snow wrote, “the mortality appears to have fallen pretty equally amongst all classes, in proportion to their numbers.” He concluded that “out of rather more than six hundred deaths, there were about one hundred in the families of tradesmen and other resident house holders.” The most wretched people in the parish, those locked in the workhouse, were almost entirely spared. That building was bordered on three sides by streets in which the outbreak raged, but lost only 5 of its 535 inmates; if it had seen the same mortality as those richer households, Snow wrote, “upwards of one hundred persons would have died.” What had saved them? The workhouse had its own pump, “and the inmates never sent to Broad Street for water.” This was a refutation of the argument that disease explicitly targeted the poor, either as punishment for their ineradicable sins or because their poverty exposed them to miasmas those above them avoided. Snow kept going, seeking out the details of death after death, and those of seemingly anomalous survivals. He finished his review of the first week’s deaths in just four days, delivering his results to parish authorities on Thursday, September 7. The next morning the parish took perhaps the most famous single action in the history of public health: it ordered that the handle from the Broad Street pump be removed. If Snow was right, the poison that had ruined the district would be cut off at its source, and the epidemic would end. It did.”
― Thomas Levenson, So Very Small: How Humans Discovered the Microcosmos, Defeated Germs--and May Still Lose the War Against Infectious Disease

“Mather took his interest in natural philosophy across the Atlantic in November 1712, sending thirteen reports to London’s Royal Society in that one month. These letters and those that followed contained a magpie’s catalog of “all New and Rare occurrences of Nature, in these parts of the World,” accumulating into a collection of more than eighty such dispatches offered up as “Curiosa Americana.” He wrote about the possible existence of giants before Noah’s flood, with a giant tooth found near Albany as evidence; about the maximum size of America’s wild turkeys (“50 or 60 pound, but the Flesh is very tough and hard”); about monstrous births, rattlesnakes, and rainbows; adding a tale of a woman who bore thirty-nine children, and so on and on and on. Such American curiosities entranced or at least amused Mather’s readers. Early in this flood of correspondence, the society’s secretary, Richard Waller, wrote to Mather that this prose cabinet of wonders “very well pleased and Entertained” the fellows. Mather responded with a heavy-handed hint: he couldn’t presume “to be thought worthy[*] to be admitted a member of that more than illustrious Society.” That nudge crossed with the news that he was already being put forward for membership. When the deed was done, Mather preened, brandishing the three magical initials, “F.R.S.,” on the cover page of several of his publications. More practically, recognition from the English-speaking world’s preeminent learned institution “wherein my gracious Lord places me,” he wrote, lifted him above—and gave him ammunition against—“the Contempt of envious Men.” Mather’s first published contribution to the Royal Society’s Philosophical Transactions appeared in number 339, which happened to be a very rich issue. Besides the extracts from Mather’s curiosities, it contained a brief note from Leeuwenhoek on a microscopic study of muscle fibers in whales. But it was another piece in the journal that caught Mather’s eye: a report by a physician, Emmanuel Timonius, on what was for his English readers a radical medical innovation—a way to avoid that notorious scourge smallpox. Titled “An Account, or History, of the Procuring the Small Pox by Incision, or Inoculation; As It Has for Some Time Been Practised at Constantinople,” it confirmed information that Mather had received about a decade before. So it was that five years later, when the Seahorse brought its cargo of disease to Boston, Mather was prepared to run a truly radical experiment on his fellow Bostonians in the hope of rescuing them from mortal peril.”
― Thomas Levenson, So Very Small: How Humans Discovered the Microcosmos, Defeated Germs--and May Still Lose the War Against Infectious Disease

“acted in the universe, but he shared his German rival’s belief in a ranked order. He too began with God, utterly unknowable and omnipotent, beneath whom came the whole catalog of angels, followed by himself and the rest of humankind. Then came everything else. “All regions below,” he wrote, “are replenished with living creatures, not only the earth with beasts and sea with fishes and the air with fowls and insects but also standing waters, vinegar, the bodies and blood of animals and other juices with innumerable living creatures too small to be seen without the help of magnifying glasses” (emphasis added). Creatures too small to be seen except through a magnifying glass! The discovery of a previously unimagined domain teeming with life did not shake his picture of the fundamental organization of nature. The seventeenth-century microscopist Jan Swammerdam rejoiced in what he saw as yet more testimony of divine generosity. In a book he called, without a scrap of subtlety, Bybel der natuure, or the Book of Nature, he affirmed: “I must offer my most humble praise to the great Creator for having made known to us so many specimens of his inexhaustible wisdom, power and goodness.” In this praise, Swammerdam affirmed a truth broadly shared among the learned, that everything God created had its own reason for being. As the philosopher and theologian Henry More wrote, the point of the new passion for discovery—including that of the microcosmos—was to “take contentment and pleasure in observing the glorious Wisdom and Goodness of God, so fairly drawn out and skilfully variegated in the sundry Objects of externall Nature.”
― Thomas Levenson, So Very Small: How Humans Discovered the Microcosmos, Defeated Germs--and May Still Lose the War Against Infectious Disease

“Usually, there is no single moment when everything changes. Pasteur’s fermentation experiments did not on their own overturn centuries of error or obliviousness. He had predecessors: eager dreamers like Cotton Mather, observers pursuing the logic of infection like Oliver Wendell Holmes and Ignaz Semmelweis, run-with-what-works empiricists like the Civil War doctors. Truly, there are vanishingly few singular moments of discovery in the history of science. And yet, while the work he would do over the next three decades is better remembered, this one paper, five pages long, is the claxon, the signal that something momentous was happening. Most important, Pasteur had grasped a singular insight, one of the most important since Leeuwenhoek first saw his tiny wriggling forms and recognized them as alive: germs that could turn juice into wine were envoys from the microcosmos at work in our macroscopic world. They could be employed to our benefit in a vat of wine or riot against our interests when beet juice turns sour. And they might do who knows what else for or to the human beings—and societies. Pasteur knew that he was onto something more than a neat bit of industrial research. His work on fermentation had pushed him beyond yeast and deeper into the microbial world. Over the next two decades, he identified a range of creatures that could drive chemical changes in the media that nourished them—like lactobacillus, a bacterium involved in the lactic acid pathway responsible for sour milk, or Mycoderma aceti (which he misidentified as a microscopic plant)—the complex of organisms that includes the bacteria behind the acetic fermentation that gives us vinegar. He discovered the existence of anaerobic bacteria, microbes that live in the absence of air. He showed that it was possible to engineer fermentations by introducing one microbe or another to the fluid to be transformed, producing alcohol or lactic acid or some other product of interest.”
― Thomas Levenson, So Very Small: How Humans Discovered the Microcosmos, Defeated Germs--and May Still Lose the War Against Infectious Disease

“That is: the idea that microbes might be involved in human maladies was imaginable long before it influenced the study of the problem of infection. Soon after Leeuwenhoek’s first observations of bacteria, a few people—not many, but not zero either—proposed, then over time came closer and closer to germ theory’s central idea. Well before such insight was accepted as medical orthodoxy, some investigators wondered if infectious conditions were caused by particular living agents—whose action could be interrupted, thus preventing both individual cases and the spread of such illnesses. But almost everyone who was in a position to explore that possibility ignored or rejected it. Why? — An answer, or rather, the beginnings of one, emerge from the certainty, deeply felt across Christian Europe, about who ruled nature. For Leeuwenhoek and for the learned community he’d joined, it went without saying: God reigned supreme over the human and the natural worlds. But who was heaven’s viceroy on earth? Not, surely, the beasts of the field or creatures of air or water—and certainly not the stray spiky tubes and spherical blobs to be seen in pond water and tooth scum.”
― Thomas Levenson, So Very Small: How Humans Discovered the Microcosmos, Defeated Germs--and May Still Lose the War Against Infectious Disease