17th Century/Pre-Industrial (Temporal Keyword)

DOCUMENT Citation Only Grace Tsai. Elizabeth Latham.

Microorganism have played a vital role in agriculture, medicine, and food production since ancient times. Societies would save, preserve, and inoculate foods and other products with microbes such as yogurt that is fermented with Lactobacillus. Although their existence and mode of action was not understood until the mid-19th century, societies and bacteria have lived symbiotically for millennia. The new field of ethnomicrobiology is defined as the study of the use of microbes, including bacteria,...