“Germs are in all bodies in health and in disease…. I do not recognize them as a primary or real cause of disease any more than drafts or any such so-called causes; at most germs can be only exciting causes…. They are innocent until made noxious by their environment. They are victims and partakers of it. They act upon it and are reacted upon by it. As they must be amenable to environmental law, the same as everything else, they necessarily change when their environment changes. Because of a change in their habitat, the germs that are native change from a non-toxic state into one of toxicity…. They are not something extraneous to the human organism, but are the products of lowered vitality in the individual, of lost resistance…. Microbes are toxic when the fluids of their habitat have become toxic—when the resistance of the body has fallen below the point at which the fluids maintain their chemico-physiological equilibrium and decomposition sets in; it is at this stage that germs multiply rapidly; they absorb the poison that is generating, and it is not strange that their products are poisonous, for the changed bodily fluids on which they feed are toxic…. My theory is that the toxicity of germs is due to being saturated with poisonous gases. The germs of typhoid fever, for example, are not poisonous until the patient is sufficiently broken down to cause the generation of toxic gases, after which all the fluids and solids of the body take on a septic state, poisoned by the absorbed gas…. Bacteria are not the cause of disease; wrong living, which puts the system into such a condition that the bacteria can readily multiply, is the real cause; the bacteria are simply necessary results…. Germs are scavengers. When an environment becomes crowded with them, it means that there is a great accumulation of waste in a state of decay…. They are normal to a certain limit in our bodies. If they become more numerous, common sense and reason would say that they must be a necessary factor in the process of elimination, or, if not a necessary factor, lost resistance has permitted them to multiply beyond the restrictions set to them by an ideal physical condition or normal resistance.” To those who accept the germ theory, it seems that there must be specific germs to account for the different types of disease. The leaders among those who reject it are able to explain satisfactorily without it why all sick people do not have the same disease. They give as the reasons for variation geographical location, the domestic and local environment, the season of the year, atmospheric conditions (e. g., hot, humid weather favoring putrefaction both in the digestive tract and in animal and vegetable matter outside it), defective anatomism, congenital or acquired, injuries, age, occupation, temperament, food, habits, and mode of living.