Health landmarks and discoveries, how human life expectancy in Britain nearly doubled from 1875-1975

The years 1875-1975 were a remarkable time period in the UK for health; as life expectancy rose from 42 years to 72 years in just 100 years. To put it in context, imagine if in the next 100 years life expectancy doubled from 80 to above 150 years, how revolutionary would that be and how scarily possible as well.

There were two principal reasons why life expectancy almost doubled from 1875 to 1975, in spite of two catastrophic world wars; one being that the British government positively reformed the county´s healthcare and set precedents world wide as to how to do so, and the second being thanks principally to individuals and scientific discoveries. Florence Nightengale, Louis Pasteur, Pierre Jacques Antoine Béchamp, Joseph Lister and Robert Koch were arguably the most influential figures of the late 19th century in health (particularly in the areas of nursing, microbiology and surgery).

They were key players who oversaw the transition from the Miasma Theory prevelant from ancient times, that is that diseases were produced due to unhealthy or polluted vapors rising from the ground or from decomposed material (in other words, due unhealthy air) to two theories which coincided but fought each other - Germ and Terrain theories (that germs cause diseases and that conditions in our body cause disease). Both these two 19th century theories stand today and it was in these times, following that transition from Miasma Theory to Germ and Terrain theories, that life-expectancy really rose.

British Public Health Acts

It should be noted that equally the British Public Health Acts of 1848 and 1875, the first legislation that focused on sanitation, played a decisive role in nearly doubling the average human-life span during the following century. The legislation of 1875, inspired by the mother of nursing, Florence Nightingale, in particular established requirements for well-built sewers, clean running water and regulated buildings codes, such that that every new building had to have a connection to the main sewerage system. These health-care acts set a precedent worldwide and as the graph below shows, were a great success.

The National Health Service

Subsequently, Clement Atlee´s labour government brought about the National Health Service (NHS) on 5 July 1948. This was the first health system in any western society to offer free medical care to the entire population, and set the standard that healthcare be provided in accordance to the needs of the public. Again as the graph below shows, this was a great success. I believe the NHS and the 1875 Public Health Act are the greatest proof that governments can actually do good.

Germ and Terrain theories

It was in 1861, Pasteur announced his finding of Germ Theory — a concept that had proved germs cause disease. Around the same time, Bechamp introduced the notion of Terrain Theory which states that disease can’t develop in a truly healthy environment, and that germs and viruses can only become disease if they are inhabiting an unhealthy organism.

On the internet you can find many cases of people dismissing either germ or terrrain theory and this is a great shame. First off, despite the rivalry between the gentlemen creating many arguments, it is not a case that one of these theories is wrong, as many argue. Both theories have a place and are correct.

However, it can be said that prevention is better than the cure in every sense when it comes to health and therefore the study of terrain should have been of greater importance medically for the public, as stressed by Florence over a decade before germ theory gained prominence. She even said -

‘True nursing ignores infection, except to prevent it.

Cleanliness and fresh air from open windows, with unremitting attention to the patient, are the only defence a true nurse either asks or needs.

Wise and humane management of the patient is the best safeguard against infection.

The greater part of nursing consists of preserving cleanliness.

The specific disease doctrine is the grand refuge of weak, uncultured, unstable minds, such as now rule in the medical profession.

There are no specific diseases; there are specific disease conditions.’

Florence Nightengale, 1859

The study of germs was an outgrowth of the study of fermentation and in truth was both a step backwards for humanity as well as forwards, since for the large part the terrain theory (with its focus on preventing illnesses), put forward by Bechamp, got neglected, while germ theory (with its focus on curing diseases) got heavily researched, funded and to put it cynically, earned doctors, medical institutions and pharmaceutical companies huge sums in return. It nevertheless was a theory that saved countless lives.

As you can see from the quote before, Nightingale had stated decades before that there were no specific diseases, but instead there were specific disease conditions. This showed how she was initially a great believer in miasma theory and terrain theory. She stressed instead how important it was to focus on preventing diseases above finding cures and treating infections as a nurse. She even said that 'diseases are not individuals arranged in classes, like cats and dogs, but conditions, growing out of one another.' What Pasteur anounced was therefore somewhat revolutionary, even if he was not technically the founder of germ theory (which really was first hypothetically put forward in 1546 by Italian Girolamo Fracastoro before the microscope). Also Ignaz Semmelweis actually pioneered the idea that doctors should wash their hands with chlorinated solutions between autopsy work and the examination of patients long before Pasteur championed Germ Theory, only Ignaz's work was wrongly discredited. In fact, Semmelweis was 'pilloried, fired from his job, and banned from the city for his suggestion that doctors were largely to blame for the deaths of many thousands of women during the 1800s from “childbed fever,” an infection of the uterus that occurred shortly after birth. It was a number of years and many more deaths before doctors realized that Semmelweis was right: Doctors were infecting women during childbirth. Childbed deaths fell to one-tenth their previous level when doctors followed Semmelweis’s admonition to wash their hands.'

It is important to note that Nightingale changed her views and acknowledged germs, particularly those found in water and the air in the mid 1880s after Robert Koch’s 1883 demonstration of the cholera bacillus as the cause of cholera. However, she kept the same ethos that treating the environment was the best way to treat germs, as emphasised by Nightingale’s 1897 ‘address’ to her nurses where she said ‘A great doctor, a friend of mine, says, “Call it germs, bacillus or dirt, the treatment is the same, that is, cleanliness.”

The study of fermentation

Béchamp is known for the beacon experiment which he conducted in 1854 where he dissolved perfect pure cane sugar in water in a glass bottle containing air but kept air-tight, and likewise in several other bottles with chemicals added but no air. Moulds and an inversion of the sugar occured just in the bottle containing air.

In a second experiment he dissolved contents from the flask with mould into two of the other flasks and it formed mold. Berchamp concluded that something in air provoked the fermentation.

After Béchamp had completely disclosed the physiological nature of fermentation, Pasteur initially twisted it into his own mistaken spontaneous generation theory, as shown by an article on fermentation in in the French Encyclopaedia Britannica dozens of years after the Beacon Experiment in which it was stated Pasteur's theory of fermentation – 'Fermentation, according to Pasteur, was caused by the growth and multiplication of unicellular organisms out of contact with free oxygen, under which circumstances they acquire the power of taking oxygen from chemical compounds in the medium in which they are growing. In other words, ‘fermentation is life without air, or life without oxygen’.

Then when studying wine in 1863, Professor Béchamp concluded that the organism causing grapes to ferment was carried on the grape, its leaves, or the vines, and that it might also be an organism injurious to the plants. Though he was advising the emperor of France from 1863 regarding wine and fermentation, it took Pasteur until 1872 to reach the same conclusion in a memoir entitled - 'New Experiments to demonstrate that the yeast germ that makes wine comes from the exterior of grapes'.

Thus, getting the facts straight, with regard to the process of fermentation it can be said that Louis Pasteur was essentially a rip off of Pierre Berchamp in his time, or at the very least many years behind Bechamp and far more eroneous. The reason why I stress this is that various modern-day publications on the intenet mislead the public into thinking that Pasteur was the man who made groundbreaking discoveries in the process of fermentation when actually the lesser known and lesser funded in his time, Pierre Bechamp was the real father of fermentation. This should be accepted.

The discovery that living organisms are the cause of fermentation is the basis of the whole modern germ- theory of disease and of the antiseptic method of treatment, and was shown first by Bechamp´s Beacon experiment. The issue is Berchamp took a view towards germs that was not as commercially lucrative as that of Pasteur´s.

Terrain Theory

Going back to the Beacon experiment and the inversion of cane sugar, Berchamp found that by adding calcium carbonate (chalk) to the mixture instead of potassium carbonate to the bottle, inversion of the cane sugar took place, but only when it was chalk not pure chemical calcium carbonate. Béchamp found that chalk seemed to be formed mostly of the mineral or fossil remains of a ‘microscopic world’ and contained organisms of infinitesimal size, which he believed to be alive and termed microzymas, from the Greek words for small ferment.

He subsequently proved that yeast and other animal and vegetable cells had individuality and life in the form of microzymas, which could cause fermentation. For example, milk.

These microzymas, rather than cells are the elementary units of life, the builders of cell tissues and therefore neccessary for every cell to grow, repair and die. Thus, the germs of the air are merely outgrown microzymas, that is bacteria set free when their former habitat was broken up. Today germs in the body are still looked on as causing the conditions/ illnesses they are found with, when actually they are merely the result of these conditions. This echoes what Florence Nightengale said decades earlier.

Thus, the terrain theory advocated by Antoine Béchamp (1816-1908) suggests microbes cannot cause infection unless the conditions within the body encourage their growth. Bechamp’s terrain theory states germs are always present in our environment and do not cause disease. Disease is associated with the physiology of the host, and not the germs per se.

All this is scientifically correct, and the obvious answer being spelled out by Bechamp was just focus on being healthy and clean, and you should avoid illnesses. However, Pasteur stole the limelight with his germ theory, and that was not all a bad thing,

First major benefits of germ theory

In the mid 1860s, inspired by Germ Theory, Joseph Lister found a way to prevent infection in wounds during and after surgery. He was the first to apply the science of Germ Theory to surgery. Lister's Antisepsis System is the basis of modern infection control. His principles made surgery safe and continue to save countless lives. As a side note, it is after him that listerine is named.

Robert Koch - The other founder of microbiology

In 1876, the physician Robert Koch built upon the work of Bechamp, Pasteur and Joseph Lister by proving that specific microbes caused specific diseases, when he showed bacillus anthracis caused anthrax. This one pathogen to one disease paradigm Koch devoloped shaped the development of diagnostic microbiology in medicine and completely proved the likes of Florence Nightengale previously wrong.

Koch successfully identified the following different bacteria that caused anthrax (1876) septicaemia (1878), tuberculosis (1882) and cholera (1883) and his methods enabled others to identify many more important pathogens. Koch in the end validated and proved germ theory to be correct as well as terrain theory.

References

(1) - AIDS "Dissident" Seeks Redemption ... and a Cure for Cancer, 2008, Jeanne Lenzer

(2) - Bechamp or Pasteur?: A Lost Chapter in the History of Biology, 2011, Ethel D. Hume