At the twentieth century’s dawn, Rockefeller’s sanguinary maneuvering—including bribery, price-fixing, corporate espionage, and creating shell companies to conduct illegal activities—had won his Standard Oil Company control of 90 percent of US oil production and made him the richest man in world history with a net worth of over half a trillion in today’s dollars. Senator Robert Lafayette excoriated Rockefeller as “the greatest criminal of the age.”39 The oil magnate’s father, William “Devil Bill” Rockefeller, was a marauding con artist who supported his family by posing as a doctor and hawking snake oil, opium elixirs, patent medicines, and other miracle cures.40 In the early 1900s, as scientists discovered pharmaceutical uses for refinery by-products, John D. saw an opportunity to capitalize on the family’s medical pedigree. At that time, nearly half the physicians and medical colleges in the United States practiced holistic or herbal medicine. Rockefeller and his friend Andrew Carnegie, the Big Steel robber baron, dispatched educator Abraham Flexner on a cross-country tour to catalog the status of America’s 155 medical colleges and hospitals.
The Rockefeller Foundation’s 1910 Flexner Report41 recommended centralizing America’s medical schooling, abolishing miasma theory, and reorienting these institutions according to “germ theory”—which held that germs alone caused disease— and the pharmaceutical paradigm that emphasized targeting particular germs with specific drugs rather than fortifying the immune system through healthy living, clean water, and good nutrition. With that narrative in hand, Rockefeller financed the campaign to consolidate mainstream medicine, co-opt the burgeoning pharmaceutical industry, and shutter its competition. Rockefeller’s crusade caused the closure of more than half of American medical schools; fostered public and press scorn for homeopathy, osteopathy, chiropractic, nutritional, holistic, functional, integrative, and natural medicines; and led to the incarceration of many practicing physicians.
Miasma vs. Germ Theory
“Miasma theory” emphasizes preventing disease by fortifying the immune system through nutrition and by reducing exposures to environmental toxins and stresses. Miasma exponents posit that disease occurs where a weakened immune system provides germs an enfeebled target to exploit. They analogize the human immune system to the skin of an apple; with the skin intact, the fruit will last a week at room temperature and a month if refrigerated. But even a small injury to the skin triggers systemic rot within hours as the billions of opportunistic microbes—thronging on the skin of every living organism—colonize the injured terrain.
Germ theory aficionados, in contrast, blame disease on microscopic pathogens. Their approach to health is to identify the culpable germ and tailor a poison to kill it. Miasmists complain that those patented poisons may themselves further weaken the immune system, or simply open the damaged terrain to a competitive germ or cause chronic disease. They point out that the world is teeming with microbes—many of them beneficial—and nearly all of them harmless to a healthy, well-nourished immune system. Miasmists argue that malnutrition and inadequate access to clean water are the ultimate stressors that make infectious diseases lethal in impoverished locales. When a starving African child succumbs to measles, the miasmist attributes the death to malnutrition; germ theory proponents (a.k.a. virologists) blame the virus. The miasmist approach to public health is to boost individual immune response.
For better or worse, the champions of germ theory, Louis Pasteur and Robert Koch, proved victorious in their fierce decades-long battle with their miasmist rival Antoine Béchamp. Pulitzer Prize–winning historian Will Durant suggests that germ theory found popular purchase by mimicking the traditional explanation for disease— demon possession—giving it a leg up over miasma. The ubiquity of pasteurization and vaccinations are only two of the many indicators of the domineering ascendancy of germ theory as the cornerstone of contemporary public health policy. A $1 trillion pharmaceutical industry pushing patented pills, powders, pricks, potions, and poisons and the powerful professions of virology and vaccinology led by “Little Napoleon” himself, Anthony Fauci, fortifies the century-old predominance of germ theory. And so with the microbe theory, the “cornerstone was laid for modern biomedicine’s basic formula with its monocausal-microbial starting-point and its search for magic bullets: one disease, one cause, one cure,” writes American sociology professor Steven Epstein.42
As Dr. Claus K?hnlein and Torsten Engelbrecht observe in Virus Mania, “The idea that certain microbes—above all fungi, bacteria, and viruses—are our great opponents in battle, causing certain diseases that must be fought with special chemical bombs, has buried itself deep into the collective conscience.”43
Imperialist ideologues find natural affinity with germ theory. A “War on Germs” rationalizes a militarized approach to public health and endless intervention in poor nations that bear heavy disease burdens. And just as the military-industrial complex prospers in war, the pharmaceutical cartel profits most from sick and malnourished populations.
On his deathbed, the victorious Pasteur is said to have recanted, “Béchamp was right,” declaring, “the microbe is nothing. The terrain is everything.”44 Miasma theory survives in marginalized, yet vibrant, pockets among integrative and functional medicine practitioners. And burgeoning science documenting the critical role of the microbiome in human health and immunity tends to vindicate Béchamp, and particularly his teachings that microorganisms are beneficial to good health. K?hnlein and Engelbrecht observe that:
[But] even for mainstream medicine, it is becoming increasingly clear that the biological terrain of our intestines—the intestinal flora, teeming with bacteria [or weighing up to 1 kg in a normal adult human, totaling 100 trillion cells.] is accorded a decisive role, because it is by far the body’s biggest and most important immune system.45