It was Napoleon’s misfortune that the political evolution of warfare had outpaced medical thought.

From The Illustrious Dead by Stephan Talty.  Page 169.

The great-man theory of medical history, the idea that progress against illness is one long string of discoveries by a series of geniuses, gains support not only from pioneers such as Pasteur or Curie but from absences such as the physician who with a flash of insight could have assembled the available evidence into an airtight case for contagion—the physician who, in the seventeenth and early eighteenth century, didn’t exist.

Dr. James Lind, the British surgeon who had invented the blind test and drastically reduced the incidence of scurvy and typhus in the Royal Navy, wasn’t that great mind. He had essentially skipped the “Eureka” moment and moved to a way of evaluating treatments and thereby found a remedy without knowing how it cured. Had that phantom genius been present to codify the work of others into germ theory, Lind could have contributed the method of proving it. 

 

Rickettsia profited from the competition among theories of disease. In the hunt for the secret of typhus, a key element wasn’t only an attempt to understand what caused the epidemics but to understand how to understand the evidence in front of one’s eyes. The most important clues would remain in plain view for hundreds of years. Generation after generation of doctors and generals, swayed by culture, conflicting evidence, and a lack of systematic thought, would confront the same evidence with the same theories and make their gambits. Those who read the evidence correctly, and there were some, survived and often prospered, for the fact is that, centuries before Napoleon faced typhus, it had been stopped dead in its tracks more than once, only to reappear and outwit its next opponent. The case of typhus illustrates how difficult and hard-won knowledge truly is. 

 

It was Napoleon’s misfortune that the political evolution of warfare had outpaced medical thought. War had become total war, with Napoleon as its first great practitioner. But medicine lacked an equivalent genius who might have revolutionized disease theory the way that he had battlefield tactics.