Question: Who proved that microorganisms cause disease?

David Walker-Sünderhauf answered on 13 Mar 2019:

Thanks for following this up on ASK! 😀 I’ve had more time to look into this now than I did in the live chat. So the scientist I mentioned on the livechat (who I initially thought was the answer) was a Dutchman called Antonie van Leeuwenhoek, who invented one of the first microscopes. But it turns out he actually only found and described different microbes, but was never involved in linking these to disease! This was in the 1670’s.
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The notion that it is microscopic organisms causing diseases is called Germ Theory, and was first proposed in the 1500’s, but was really obscure back then all the way through until the 1800’s. In the 1850’s, Louis Pasteur (who was one of the pioneers of vaccination) and later Robert Koch respectively proved that microbes cause food to spoil and identified the specific microbes responsible for causing diseases like anthrax. These two scientists really kick-started a revolution in how we looked at diseases & how to cure them.
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I hope that answers your question better 🙂