Machines Like Me

I reflected on the long strange history that lay behind this tableau. The idea that germs were responsible for the spread of disease didn’t gain general acceptance until the 1880s and the work of Louis Pasteur and others, only a hundred years before this poster was devised. Until then, against a few dissenters, the miasma theory prevailed – disease originated in bad air, bad smells, decomposition, or even in night air, against which windows were properly closed. But the device that could have spoken truth to medicine was available 200 years before Pasteur. The amateur scientist of the seventeenth century who knew best how to make and use the device, was known to the scientific elite of London.

When Antonie van Leeuwenhoek, solid citizen of Delft, a draper and a friend of Vermeer, began sending his observations of microscopic life to the Royal Society in 1673, he revealed a new world and initiated a biological revolution. He meticulously described plant cells and muscle fibre, single-cell organisms, his own spermatozoa, and bacteria from his own mouth. His microscopes needed sunlight and had only a single lens, but no one could grind them the way he could. He was working with magnification powers of 275 and above. By the end of his life, Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society had published 190 of his accounts.

Suppose there had been a young spark at the Royal Society lolling in the library after a good lunch, a copy of the Transactions on his lap, who began to speculate that some of these tiny organisms might cause meat to putrefy, or could multiply in the bloodstream and cause disease. There had been such sparks at the Society before and there were many to come. But this one would have needed an interest in medicine as well as scientific curiosity. Medicine and science would not become full partners until well into the twentieth century. Even in the fifties, tonsils were regularly sliced from the throats of healthy children on the basis of standard practice rather than good evidence. A doctor in Leeuwenhoek’s time could easily believe that everything to be known in his field was already well understood. The authority of Galen, active in the second century, was near total. It would be a long time before medical men, in general a grand lot, peered humbly down a microscope in order to learn the basics of organic life.

But our man, whose name will become a household word, is different. His hypotheses will be possible to test. He borrows a microscope – Robert Hooke, honoured fellow of the Society, will surely lend him one – and sets to. A germ theory of disease begins to form. Others join in the research. Perhaps within twenty years surgeons are washing their hands between patients. The reputations of forgotten doctors like Hugh of Lucca and Girolamo Fracastoro are restored. By the mid-eighteenth century, childbirth is safer; certain men and women of genius are born who otherwise would have died in infancy. They might change the course of politics, the arts, the sciences. Loathsome figures who could do great harm also spring up. In minor and possibly major ways, history follows a different course long after our brilliant young member of the Royal Society has grown old and died.

The present is the frailest of improbable constructs. It could have been different. Any part of it, or all of it, could be otherwise. True of the smallest and largest concerns. How easy to conjure worlds in which my toenail had not turned against me; in which I was rich, living north of the Thames after one of my schemes had succeeded; in which Shakespeare had died in childhood and no one missed him, and the United States had taken the decision to drop on a Japanese city the atomic bomb they had tested to perfection; or in which the Falklands Task Force had not set off, or had returned victorious and the country was not in mourning; in which Adam was an assemblage far-off in the future; or in which 66 million years ago the earth had turned for another few minutes before the meteor struck, so missing the sun-blotting, fine-grained gypsum sand of the Yucatan, allowing the dinosaurs to live on and deny future space to the mammals, clever apes included.

My treatment, when it came at last, began pleasantly with my naked foot soaking in a bowl of hot, soapy water. Meanwhile, the nurse, a large, friendly woman from Ghana, arranged her steel instruments on a tray with her back to me. Her expertise was as complete as her self-confidence. There was no mention of anaesthesia and I was too proud to ask, but when she took my foot onto her aproned lap and set about her business with my ingrowing toenail, I was not too proud to squeak at the crucial moment. Relief was immediate. I made my way along the street, as though on rubber wheels, to my home, the centre of my preoccupations, which had lately shifted from Miranda back to Adam.