It was unclear to me when reading this if this was meant to be a true history or an allegory for something that was actually happening in the science world at t

It was unclear to me when reading this if this was meant to be a true history or an allegory for something that was actually happening in the science world at the time – as in "imagine if the scientific world had reacted to surgical sterilization the way we're reacting to X right now." But there's no context here as to what X might be if that's what he intended.