His name was Ignaz Semmelweis, and they threw him in a mental institution. He was trying to get doctors to wash their hands in between handling corpses and doing surgery, and they got super offended about it.

Edit: I AM LYING! Partly. Semmelweis discovered illnesses caused by bacteria, but he didn't understand that they were caused by microbes, or the mechanism at work. He just was able to piece enough of it together to test empirically that if the doctors washed their hands, then people didn't get sick in the same way that they did if the hands had corpse-goo on them. Linking him to specifically understanding that tiny little creatures were everywhere was a little bit misleading thing for me to do.

Also, they were usually delivering babies, not doing "surgery" in the modern sense of opening people up and poking around in them.

The rest of what I said is true.

Semmelweiss. His radical idea of "surgeons ought to wash their hands" saw him widely ridiculed and reduced to poverty, and he died in an institution.

What I love is that when Van Leeuwenhoek first saw microorganisms in his microscope he named them “animalcules”, as in animal + molecule. Isn’t that freakin cute?

Before Louis Pasteur's disproving of spontaneous generation, most people believed that bacteria and putrefactive organisms like maggots etc. spontaneously poofed into existence, like a video game character spawning. Pasteur suggested that maggots came from flies laying their eggs on rotting meat etc, and that bacteria were everywhere and will multiply quickly under the right conditions. A lot of people at the time thought these were crackpot ideas.

And if you believe that, then you'll believe anything... that is supported by hard evidence and deducted from those by sound logical principles.

In the Discworld books witches are much like local doctors. There's a young witch that can't convince a family to move the privy away from the garden, which is making them sick. She tries to explain there are tiny, tiny animals that are coming from the poop and that's what's making them ill. They smile politely and don't change anything.

The old witch comes along and it explains that the problem is the goblins in the outhouse and to move it far away from the garden. They happily do so.

This episode of This Podcast Will Kill You actually goes into that: https://player.fm/series/series-2359894/ep-31-giardia-gerardia

There is also a transcript if you just want to read about it: https://thispodcastwillkillyou.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/07/TPWKY-Episode-31-Giardia.pdf

(Warning: they make an alcoholic beverage towards the beginning of each episode in case anyone is in recovery)

Wierd part is you can actually see it with a microscope. Anime Parallel world pharmacy made more sense then real life.

Wee beasties!

Imagine this guy trying to explain this discovery to people who spend days reading and responding to articles trying to calculate how many angles can fit on the head of a pin.

Horton Hears a Who if Horton was the one saying "Boil that dust speck! Boil that dust speck!"

Reminds me of this work by Latour. It goes into the tremendous amount of oftentimes political labor that goes into the establishment of new scientific knowledge as paradigmatic:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Pasteurization_of_France

There's a part of Old Yeller dedicated to this. His uncle doesn't believe in germs because germs aren't in the Bible.