Yale Open Courses

If you're interested in self-education, Yale Open Courses is a useful tool.  From what I can tell, all of the classes have online video lectures, plus course texts and exams.  Here Yale gives us the opportunity to experience the hallowed Ivy League, albeit without a grader.  I won't vouch for the excellence of any of these courses, except the one on Dante.  

The course on the history of epidemic diseases is pretty interesting, though dry.  Lecture 13 is particularly fascinating.  Prior to the germ theory of disease, the major debate among the experts was whether diseases were transmitted by people to objects and then back to people (contagion theory), or whether people caught diseases because of negative environmental and social factors (such as bad air, or miasma).  Interestingly, popular culture favored the contagion theory, while the majority of experts  were anti-contagionists.  Shows what the experts knew! The lecture argues that there were multiple ironies in the anti-contagionists' theory, practice, and results.  While they were ultimately wrong about how disease was transmitted, they were "splendidly wrong," enacting positive, helpful social reforms based on erroneous theory.  Some of these reforms included the construction of new sanitation structures, including sewers and rebuilt cities (Paris was partly rebuilt and Naples was totally rebuilt).  The anti-contagionists were trying to get rid of all "filth," such as decaying animal and plant matter, which supposedly contaminated the air and the ground.  They were wrong, but they saved thousands, perhaps millions, of lives -- so the lecture argues.

An interesting part of this story is that Max von Pettenkoffer, an anti-contagonist, bet Robert Koch that the bacterium that causes cholera did not actually cause cholera.  Pettenkoffer thought that the bacterium was inert until it got into each city's water table and fermented the organic material under the city (hence the need for waterways that drained the water away from cities).  So Koch sent Pettenkoffer a concoction of the cholera bacteria, which Pettenkoffer drank to prove that he was right!  Interestingly, Pettenkoffer did not get sick, so he continued to believe in his own wrong theory.

Another interesting tidbit.  Lecture 14 briefly makes the argument that Bram Stoker's Dracula is an allegory of contagious disease.  Like cholera, Count Dracula travels from eastern Europe to London, via the port cities and railroads that infectious disease always followed.  Dracula arrives in London during the summer, just as cholera would've, attempting to ravage the population.  And who fights against Dracula?  Well, of course, medical doctors.