American Decades
Germs
Public Awareness of Germs.
If the health concerns of the average American during the 1950s had to be reduced to a single word, it would probably be germs, or disease-causing microorganisms. Then as now, few people knew much about germs except that they were sometimes passed from one person to another and that they can cause many types of misery, including colds, flu, measles, mumps, herpes, syphilis and gonorrhea, tuberculosis, polio, and even, according to some researchers of the day, cancer. The public concern about germs was not to know more about how they lived but to know more about how to kill them, and thus the new miracle germ poisons—especially streptomycin, Terramycin, and synthetic penicillin—seemed to herald a disease-free society.
What are Germs?
The two most feared germs are bacteria and viruses. During the 1950s microbiologists made remarkable advances in the understanding and control of these...
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1950's Medicine and Health
