That was very sad. They were so close: they even recognized that tea and coffee were safer than water, but they thought it was the tea or coffee plants, rather than because the beverages were made with boiling water.
We’re only two years away from Louis Pasteur’s discovery of the germ theory of disease. If the medical community had been a little more receptive and a little less anti-Semitic toward Ignaz Semmelweis a decade earlier, we would already have the germ theory. But Pasteur was ridiculed and Semmelweis was presumably beaten to death in a mental hospital instead.
The Lysenkoists weren’t invented by Stalin in the 1930s. As Galileo knew, they’ve always been with us.