From miasmas to germs: discovery of the etiologic mentality and its genesis and development in Antioquia, Colombia

Abstract

Medical mentality is the way of seing and understanding disease at a given historical period. Louis Pasteur was the father of the so called etiologic mentalíty that proposes "germs as causes for diseases"; his contemporaries, Lister and Koch, worked on the same line, proposed new theories and carried them to practical implications. This paper explains the development of etiologic mentality and how medicine in Antioquia, Colombia, at the end of the XIX century and the beginning of the present one received and assimilated its influence and became one of its protagonists.