evidence: One much-referenced text about Béchamp is a 1920 book that tells his story as a "lost chapter in the history of biology". It describes his notion that microbes were not the malicious invaders that germ theorists claim (why else would they not cause disease always and everywhere?). Instead he thought illness essentially depended on "tiny molecular granulations" called microzymas, which only become pathogenic when a change in environmental balance or function made them so. It was from this change in the bodily "terrain", and not from germ invasion, that illness arose. Many germ theory deniers are adherents to this terrain theory, extrapolating from Béchamp a variety of alternative therapies specifically tailored to reduce toxins and rebalance the body. The therapies promise to create a corporal environment rendered immune (though they would not use this term) to microbes because it lives peaceably with them. This is an idea that inflames many of those who police the lines of medical and scientific orthodoxy. Yet, as diametrically opposed adherents to germ theory and Béchamp’s terrain theory seem, the two ideas have not always been considered mutually exclusive.