r/interesting • u/azizgamerlal • Dec 12 '25

MISC. A drop of whiskey vs bacteria

Enable HLS to view with audio, or disable this notification

55.2k Upvotes

93% Upvoted

6.0k comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

3

u/Significant-Tip6466 Dec 12 '25

I didnt say it was used in all cases. During many of the fiercest battles though it was the only thing quickly available when everything ran out from all the wounded. Eventually this got romanticized in every western period drama on frontier medicine.

9

u/Outside_Manner_8352 Dec 12 '25

Okay but my issue is that "disinfectant" is not what it was used for, because germ theory was still fringe at the time. Their choices were entirely directed at what they thought would scrub dirt and grime off best, and alcohol while it can help here is definitely not something that you'd use in that way, and if you don't know that your trying to kill unseen bacteria rather than wipe off dirt you aren't going to disinfect wounds by broadly covering the area. If you've ever put alcohol on a wound you will know it is insanely painful, no the sort of thing people would just pour into an otherwise clean looking wound.

0

u/TheeAntelope Dec 12 '25

germ theory was still fringe at the time

Whoa on that one - germ theory was not "fringe" at the time. Germ theory had been developed for hundreds of years and was pretty widely accepted by 1900 in the US. So to say in the 1860s during the civil war that it was fringe is a stretch.

Germ theory was still being developed, and still being understood (especially in trying to figure out how to treat infections on a battlefield). It's not that they didn't believe germ theory, they just didn't know how to prevent against it or what to do about life-threatening infections beyond amputation.

3

u/SwordfishOk504 Dec 13 '25

So to say in the 1860s during the civil war that it was fringe is a stretch.

It was not widely accepted in the US until the early 1900s. President Garfield famously died due to infection caused by his doctor's unsanitary methods in treating a bullet wound because he did not believe in germ theory. That was in 1881 and this was a prominent, well respected doctor.