en to natural science by
churchmen about the time of the Galileo controversy, might influence
this judgment of the distinguished Jesuit's scientific accomplishments.
With regard to his discoveries in medicine especially, and above all
his {115} announcement of the microbic origin of contagious disease,
it may be thought that this was a mere chance expression and not at
all the result of serious scientific conclusions. Tyndall, however,
the distinguished English physicist, would not be the one to give
credit for scientific discoveries, and to a clergyman in a distant
century, unless there was definite evidence of the discovery. It is
not generally known that to the great English physicist we owe the
almost absolute demonstration of the impossibility of spontaneous
generation, together with a series of studies showing the existence
everywhere in the atmosphere of minute forms of life to which
fermentative changes and also the infectious diseases--though at that
time this was only a probability--are to be attributed. When Tyndall
was reviewing, in the midst of the controversy over spontaneous
generation, the question of the microbic origin of disease, he said:
"Side by side with many other theories has run the germ theory of
epidemic disease. The notion was expressed by Kircher and favored by
Linnaeus, that epidemic diseases may be due to germs which enter the
body and produce disturbance by the development within the body of
parasitic forms of life."

How much attention Father Kircher's book on the pest or plague, in
which his theory of the micro-organismal origin of disease is put
forward, attracted from the medical profession can be understood from
the fact that it was submitted to three of the most distinguished
physicians in {116} Rome before being printed, and that their
testimony to its value as a contribution to medicine prefaced the
first edition. They are not sparing in their praise of it. Dr. Joseph
Benedict Sinibaldus, who was the Professor of the Practice of Medicine
in the Roman University at the time, says that "Father Kircher's book
not only contains an excellent resume of all that is known about the
pest or plague, but also as many valuable hints and suggestions on the
origin and spread of the disease, which had never before been made."
He considers it a very wonderful thing that a non-medical man should
have been able to place himself so thoroughly in touch with the
present state of medicine in respect t