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Even the editor of the highly respected Medical Record found more to fear than to admire in Lister’s theory. “Judging the future by the past,” he wrote, “we are likely to be as much ridiculed in the next century for our blind belief in the power of unseen germs, as our forefathers were for their faith in the influence of spirits, of certain planets and the like, inducing certain maladies.
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Candice Millard (Destiny of the Republic: A Tale of Madness, Medicine and the Murder of a President)