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Article ID: CBB001022701

Joseph Lister: First Use of a Bacterium as a “Model Organism” to Illustrate the Cause of Infectious Disease of Humans (2010)

Santer, Melvin (Author)

Notes and Records: The Royal Society Journal of the History of Science
Volume: 64
Pages: 59--65

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Disease and diseases Bacteriology Infectious diseases Medicine Models and modeling in science Experimental organisms 19th century 20th century, early Great Britain Lister, Joseph, Baron

Joseph Lister's goal was to show that a pure culture of Bacterium lactis, normally present in milk, uniquely caused the lactic acid fermentation of milk. To demonstrate this fact he devised a procedure to obtain a pure clonal population of B. lactis, a result that had not previously been achieved for any microorganism. Lister equated the process of fermentation with infectious disease and used this bacterium as a model organism, demonstrating its role in fermentation; from this result he made the inductive inference that infectious diseases of humans are the result of the growth of specific, microscopic, living organisms in the human host.

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