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Editor's note: This is the first installment in a two-part tribute to Robert Koch in honor of his birthday. Koch proved the cause of anthrax and discovered tuberculosis.
Today is the birthday of Robert Koch, the German physician and Nobel Prize winner who proved that bacillus anthracis causes anthrax. He also discovered the tubercle bacillus, the cause of most cases of tuberculosis. Koch was born on December 11, 1843 in Clausthal, a mining town in the Upper Harz mountains of Lower Saxony. He taught himself to read by the age of five and later attended a local high school, where he demonstrated an aptitude for biology. In 1862, Koch enrolled as a medical student at the University of Göttingen and learned from Friedrich Gustav Jacob Henle, a pathologist who believed that parasitic organisms caused infectious diseases. After earning his M.D. degree in 1866, Koch went to Berlin, where he studied the work of Rudolf Virchow, a renowned doctor and biologist who posited that every cell originates from another cell. In 1867, Koch moved to Hamburg to work as an assistant in that city's general hospital. He then entered general practice in the province of Posen before passing the district medical officer's exam and serving in the Franco-Prussian War.
In 1872, Koch was made medical officer of Wollstein, a farming district in southeastern Germany. Although his access to medical literature and laboratory equipment was limited, Koch sought to prove that bacillus anthracis, a bacterium that Antoine Pollender and others had discovered, caused an acute infectious disease which affected many of the region's cattle, goats, and sheep. Using slivers of wood, Koch inoculated mice with anthrax bacilli taken from the spleens of farm animals that had died of anthrax. He then inoculated another group of mice with blood taken from the spleens of healthy animals. After the first group of mice died, Koch grew pure cultures of anthrax bacilli in order to study the conditions under which anthrax flourished. Koch's decision to share his drawings and photographs with Ferdinand Cohn, a professor of botany at the University of Breslau, led to the publication of Koch's work in 1876. Koch's subsequent efforts to stain and photograph bacteria further established the district medical officer as student of infectious diseases.
Click here for Part 2.
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