How it happened that a portion of a treatise entitled New Improvements of Planting and Gardening both Philosophical and Practical by Richard Bradley FRS, which dealt with blights of trees and plants, provided the first report of an environment that contained green sulphur photosynthetic bacteria

Abstract

Abstract Richard Bradley proposed that biological agents caused infectious disease. He agreed that air could transmit disease, but it had to contain a living agent, either visible or microscopic. To dismiss the idea that air alone could cause disease he included evidence provided by Robert Balle about a toxic grotto near Lake Averna, close to Naples, whose fumes were lethal to animals and humans yet that lethality was not contagious and occurred quickly, not a characteristic of ‘pestilential fevers’. In this grotto the surface water was covered with a ‘green scum’, a layer of green sulphur photosynthetic bacteria that could live in that anoxic environment, which contained hydrogen sulphide and carbon dioxide gas and was accessible to visible light. This environment was a natural enrichment culture for these bacteria. It was the first time that the presence of these bacteria was disclosed in the scientific literature.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 14 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.