Before germ theory, disease was bad air and imbalanced humours. Pasteur's swan-neck flasks killed spontaneous generation; Koch's postulates turned 'this microbe causes this disease' into something provable. Modern medicine starts here. This is the real knowscape from knowhere, not a picture of one. Drag it. Watch what actually changes.
Disease is a broken relationship between a host and something else — a microbe, a deficiency, an inherited fault. For infection specifically, the something else is alive: a pathogen that has to get in, survive, and spread, and every question here traces one of those three jobs. Prove it's the cause and you've done what Koch and Pasteur did.
Germ theory replaced miasma explanations by demonstrating that specific microorganisms cause specific diseases through Pasteur's experiments disproving spontaneous generation and Koch's rigorous postulates.
This concept has no prerequisites in knowhere's map — it is a root. Everything in the topic is built from here.
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