Microbe Hunters provides dramatized accounts of eleven early pioneers of microbiology and their important discoveries. Beginning in 1650 with the invention of the microscope and the first discovery of the microbial world, de Kruif chronicles how scientific knowledge builds upon itself with essays on Pasteur and Koch who demonstrated that microbes can cause disease; Metchnickoff’s discovery of an immune system that battles microbes, as well as further essays on viral and parasitic diseases ...