A bronze bust of Louis Pasteur on a marble base
Louis Pasteur, 1889
Marked Broad Street, Soho

SubjectIn outline · lessons being written

Germs, nurses and penicillin

In a century, medicine changed more than in the two thousand years before. Doctors learned that germs cause disease, nurses made hospitals cleaner, and penicillin, discovered in 1928, was mass-produced in the Second World War.

Place
Broad Street, Soho · Scutari · St Mary’s Hospital, Paddington · OxfordEurope
Laid out as
An inventionA new way of doing something, link by link: what came before, the breakthrough, and what it changed.
Lessons
7 planned, none written yet

The lessons we plan

Titles may change as they are written

  1. ISemmelweis and hand-washing
  2. IIJohn Snow’s pump
  3. IIINightingale and Seacole
  4. IVPasteur and Koch
  5. VLister’s spray
  6. VIFleming’s mould
  7. VIIPenicillin for the troops

Still to come

The people and objects these lessons will cover

People

  • Ignaz Semmelweis
  • John Snow
  • Florence Nightingale
  • Mary Seacole
  • Louis Pasteur
  • Alexander Fleming
  • Dorothy Hodgkin

Objects

  • Snow’s cholera map
  • Nightingale’s rose diagram
  • Fleming’s mould

Where it sits

All of human history, era by era

Early human ancestryOur species and the Old Stone AgeFarming and the New Stone AgeFirst cities and the Bronze AgeThe Iron Age and growing statesThe classical worldAfter the empiresMedieval networks and empiresOceans crossedRevolutions and the first factoriesIndustry, empire and world warThe world since 1945

1847 to 1945. Each era is drawn the same width, so the earliest are squeezed: era II alone is over 300,000 years.

Nearby in time and place

This page is an outline. The summary above is a starting point; each lesson, when it is written, will give its sources, its pictures and where historians disagree. Spotted a mistake?