Limitations

• The biggest contender against germ theory were miasma and spontaneous generation (the idea that living things (microbes) could arise from non-living matter)
• Pasteur had no impact on British medicine at the start because :

  • he wasn’t a doctor - worked in spoilt food, not diseases
  • not everyone accepted germ theory
  • the spontaneous generation theory was popular and accepted until the 1870s
  • Pasteur struggled to identify specific bacteria which caused individual diseases