It took people some thousands of years to make remarkably simple connections in the field of medicine. Consider how long it took them to find out the link between, well, shit mixing with food and food poisoning or shit in drinking water leading to cholera. For some reason, medicine took astonishingly long to reach the level of 'common sense' that we seem to take for granted and see in other fields of science from a lot earlier. I wonder why.
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The people especially in the west were heavily influenced by the Greeks and did not think independantly for themselves for a long time. the Greeks thought that disease is caused by bad air, vapours and such. It took classic work by snow who showed that the London epidemic of mid 19th century cholera was caused by water from a single hand pump. He did it by pinning pins on a large London map and finding out the number of cases in each district and demonstrated that all the cases went out in a circle with the hand pump as the central point. Closing the pump brought the epideic under control. this was science and detective acumen at its best.
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