Another Sunday, Another Essay
“Changes in pathological science thus rewrote the relations between life and death: the environment provoked life, life provoked disease, and disease provoked death. Later in the [nineteenth] century, the classic criterion of death—putrefaction—was shown by Louis Pasteur to result not from the lack of life, but from the very superabundance of living pathogens. Bateriology thus taught that life itself was the cause of death.”
