Benjamin Marten

Benjamin Marten

Portrait of Benjamin Marten

Birth date	c. 1690
Birth place	England
Died	1752
Place of death	England
Nationality	British
Known for	Early theory of infectious disease

Benjamin Marten (c. 1690 – 1752) was an English physician and early theorist of infectious disease. He is best known for his pioneering ideas on the transmission of tuberculosis, which he proposed in the early 18th century. Marten's work laid the groundwork for later developments in the understanding of infectious diseases.

Early Life and Education

Little is known about Benjamin Marten's early life and education. He was born around 1690 in England. It is presumed that he received a medical education, although specific details about his training are not well-documented.

Contributions to Medicine

Marten is most renowned for his work on tuberculosis, a disease that was rampant in his time. In 1720, he published a book titled A New Theory of Consumptions More Especially of a Phthisis or Consumption of the Lungs. In this work, Marten proposed that tuberculosis, then known as "consumption," might be caused by "wonderfully minute living creatures" that were transmitted from person to person.

This idea was revolutionary for its time, as the prevailing theories of disease causation were largely based on miasma or imbalances in bodily humors. Marten's hypothesis anticipated the germ theory of disease, which would not be fully developed until the 19th century by scientists such as Louis Pasteur and Robert Koch.

Legacy

Although Marten's ideas were not widely accepted during his lifetime, they represent an important step in the evolution of medical thought. His work is now recognized as an early precursor to the germ theory of disease, which fundamentally changed the practice of medicine and led to the development of modern microbiology.

Also see

• Germ theory of disease
• Tuberculosis
• Louis Pasteur
• Robert Koch
• History of medicine

• 
  Mycobacterium tuberculosis