There is but one disease, caused by microbes, and the Microbe Killer cures every illness by destroying the microbes in the body; as Radam put it, all patients are treated with the same medicine just as a gardener treats all weeds alike.
This is the doctrinal core of the case: the single-cause claim that all disease is one disease, caused by microbes, so one remedy that kills microbes can cure everything. The National Library of Medicine quotes Radam’s book making “the ‘simple’ statement that all diseases have a single origin: ‘There is, in truth, but one disease.’” The Handbook of Texas records that Radam’s solution “exploited a popular belief that germs caused all diseases; his mixture supposedly exterminated these germs,” and preserves his own gardening analogy, “I treated all my patients with the same medicine, just as in my garden I would treat all weeds alike.” The claim is mechanism-only and refuted: the germ theory Radam invoked in fact showed the opposite, that distinct diseases are caused by distinct organisms (Koch’s tubercle bacillus among them), not by a single universal microbe, and no remedy cures all disease by a single germicidal act. It is the same one-disease, one-cure structure this archive documents in Morison’s blood-impurity doctrine, here reattached to the new language of microbes.
Appears in
Sources
- Microbes and the Microbe Killer — Radam, William. Microbes and the Microbe Killer. New York: The Author (Knickerbocker Press), 1890. xiii, 369 pages, illustrations, portrait. Wellcome Collection work yyfshjxr (Public Domain Mark); full scan at Internet Archive identifier b21499457; LCCN 08094478.
- Radam's Microbe Killer: Advertising Cures for Tuberculosis — Hemmingson, Grace; Lynch, Scottie; Mason, Nancy Fowlkes; and Ewing, E. Thomas. 'Radam's Microbe Killer: Advertising Cures for Tuberculosis.' Circulating Now (US National Library of Medicine, History of Medicine Division), October 9, 2015.
- Medical Quackery (Handbook of Texas Online) — Burns, Chester R. 'Medical Quackery.' Handbook of Texas Online. Texas State Historical Association. Original publication date May 1, 1995.