Zymotic diseases (for the Greek language term zumoun for "ferment"), an obsolete term in medicine, formerly applied to the class of acute infectious maladies,[1] presumed to be due to some virus or organism which acts in the system like a ferment. Note: This term was obsolete even in 1911, the date of the original version of the text below:[2]
Zyme or microzyme was the name of a germ presumed to be the cause of zymotic diseases.
This term was used extensively in the English Bills of Mortality as a cause of death from 1842, and ceased to be used in the early 1900s. Robert Newstead used this term in a 1908 publication in the Annals of Tropical Medicine and Parasitology, to describe the contribution of house flies (Musca domestica) towards the spread of infectious diseases.
Antoine Béchamp proposed that microzymas, not cells, were a fundamental building block of life, surviving the death of the organism, and coalescing to form blood clots and bacteria. His ideas did not gain acceptance.[3]