Benjamin Marten and his "New Theory of Consumptions".

Although historians of microbiology find an embarrassing wealth of material on towering figures, such as Pasteur, Koch, and Winogradsky, extreme difficulty attends efforts to uncover details on contributions and lives of the "unknown soldiers" of science. The role played by less distinguished persons is as important in its way as later, epic syntheses, but early arrivals at the scene of great victories seldom are heralded as heroes. The history of the germ theory of disease is not especially well documented, and the following essay on the efforts of an obscure figure to apply animalcular information of the late 17th and early 18th centuries to the causes of tuberculosis and other infectious diseases may be a case in point. Early in 1720, a small volume (186 pages) titled A New Theory of Consumptions: More Especially of a Phthisis or Consumption of the Lungs (16) was published in London. In addition to the text, this book (price, three shillings and sixpence) consisted of a 12-page preface signed, "Benjamin Marten, From my House in Theobald's-Row near Red-Lyon Square in Holbourn, Sep. 1st, 1719." The title page is dated 1720. There is a 22-page table of contents at the end of the book. Briefly, Marten's theory stated that "the prime, essential, and hitherto accounted inexplicable cause of that disease" was, in fact, a specific animalcule infecting the lungs. This remarkable proposal was experimentally verified by Robert Koch 163 years later. The notion of a possible relationship between animalcules and infectious organjsms became commonplace shortly after Leeuwenhoek's discovery of bacteria in 1676, but little was made of this for over 150 years. Benjamin Marten and the antecedents of his theory have elicited little interest among medical microbiologists and historians (10, 22, 27) concerned with the genesis of the germ theory of disease. This neglect may be due partly to Marten's obscurity; indeed, only one serious study on Marten has been published, and that was in 1911 (22). MARTEN'S THEORY