Animalcular theory of disease

“In spite of all opposition, the animalcular theory continued to be preferred by a scattering men to whom no other explanation was satisfactory. Even these men failed to attempt to prove or disprove their ideas by experimentation. Medical quarrels at this time were still settled by the academic means of sporadic observation and logic – a last remnant of the old scholastic thinking. . . . The influence of the animalcular school of thought was not very widespread and, to judge from the decreasing volume of literature, appears to have almost disappeared by the late 1850s” (Allen, 515-16). . . . “The micro-organism theory of disease, which was so generally discredited during the first seventy years of the century, was accepted in the short period between 1875 and 1890” (518).