David’s Reviews > The Song of the Cell: An Exploration of Medicine and the New Human > Status Update

In 1847 it was realized that delivering babies after performing autopsies greatly benefited from hand-washing in-between! Cells as building blocks for both plant and animal took long enough already. But the link between infectious cells causing/spreading illness still took great scientific minds too long to grasp. This history early in this book is really amazing, as it reveals these entrenched beliefs.

A hip fracture, cardiac arrest, immunodeficiency, Alzheimer’s dementia, AIDS, pneumonia, lung, cancer, kidney failure, arthritis – all could be reconceived as the results of cells, or systems of cells, functioning abnormally. And all could be perceived as loci of cellular therapies.