Leeuwenhoek's Legatees and Beijerinck's Beneficiaries: A History of Medical Virology in The Netherlands

Abstract

The title of the book pays tribute to two Dutch scientists without whom
virology would arguably not exist today, at least not in its present guise. The
first is Antony van Leeuwenhoek, whose reports of microscopic discoveries
in the early eighteenth century aroused interest in the world of invisible
creatures. His findings laid the basis for a theory of a particulate cause
of infectious diseases, but, as George Rosen wrote, without any tangible
results in support of the theory (1993/1958, pp. 84-85). Some 250 years later
Martinus Willem Beijerinck launched the discipline of virology with his
idea that tobacco mosaic disease (TMD) was caused by a living contagious
fluid or filterable living pathogen.