> Why? We got attached to pleasant sounding but made up story. We didn’t question it enough to allow the evidence before our eyes to update our thinking.

It bears mentioning that this isn't simply a matter of “everyone was wrong until a clever chap was first to question established wisdom and suddenly everyone was enlightened”.

It's more like “everyone enforces the established wisdom on everyone else and the clever chap is punished for being clever”.

I don't know if this applied to the germ theory, but it applied to plenty of theories the most famous of which being geocentrism. It's very likely that people before Copernicus questioned geocentrism, perhaps even thought of heliocentrism, but were either tortured or killed for it, or stayed silent from the get-go because they knew that would happen to them.

Lone clever chaps do not overturn established wisdom. It's a gradual process that requires a critical mass and a mountain of evidence.