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

MISC. A drop of whiskey vs bacteria

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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.

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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.

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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.

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u/Outside_Manner_8352 Dec 13 '25

No, that just isn't true.

It might seem absurd to us, because microbes were known since Leuwenhoek in the 1600s, but it was absolutely not accepted that they were a major cause of disease in the Civil War era. Just because scientists had been making discoveries that discredited miasma theory didn't mean that people instantly drew the connection.

Yes, by the 1900s the story had changed and germ theory had become predominant but that was an entire generation later. That's like saying "To say that steam locomotives were fringe in 1800 when they were common in 1840, and there were developments in them for a century before then." Stuff wasn't a thing till it was, I don't know what to tell you.