The next great breakthrough came in the 1860s when Louis Pasteur, using Lister’s microscope, discovered germs and revolutionised medical knowledge. Germs were given their name because they ...

Enter: Louis Pasteur ... bacteria in the air. Pasteur went on to argue that this same bacteria could cause disease. To describe these ideas, he coined the phrase ‘Germ Theory’.

Their ideas were largely ignored until Louis Pasteur carried out his own detailed experiments that disproved the chemical decomposition theory. Another popular theory of the time was spontaneous ...