ing good medical schools than by suppressing those that are poor or by formal restrictions making it difficult to enter the medical profession.
ROBERT KOCH
In the death of Robert Koch, the world loses one of its greatest men, whose service to it has been beyond all measure. It is not easy to realize the changes in bacteriology and in medicine which have taken place in the course of the past thirty or forty years, or how largely these are due to this one man. Koch was preceded by Pasteur and Lister, but bacteriology and the germ theory of disease scarcely existed when in 1876 he published his paper announcing the isolation of the bacillus of anthrax. He was at that time a country physician, but had had the advantage of studying medicine at Göttingen under Wagner and Henle. One wonders whether the hundred and twenty-five thousand physicians now practising in the United States would not produce some men of the type of Koch if they had been turned in the right direction at the university. If so, how small would be the cost of such schools in comparison with their value.
Koch published in 1878 a second important paper on infectious diseases, and was in 1880 given opportunity to devote himself to research work by being appointed to the Prussian department of public health. In his small laboratory at Berlin, with Loeffler and Gaffky as assistants, he developed the methods of bacteriology by cultures and disinfection, and in 1882 made announcement of the far-reaching discovery of the bacillus of tuberculosis. A year later he visited Egypt and India and discovered the comma bacillus of cholera.
Koch continued his study of tuberculosis, cholera and other diseases, not only from the point of view of laboratory science, but devising and applying means to combat them. In 1880 came the discovery of tuberculin, the curative power of which was exaggerated, not so much by Koch as by the general public. Koch was fully justified by its diagnostic value; his statement of its curative properties was cautious, and if it has not fully justified even these modest claims, it has led to the whole subject of vaccine therapy, including diphtheria anti-toxin, and may still fully confirm such claims as Koch made for its curative value in tuberculosis. Koch was again criticized when in 1901 he announced the discovery that human and bovine tuberculosis are not identical, but time appears to have proved that he was correct in his facts and also in his claim that the main efforts should be directed toward preventing human contagion.
In later years Koch devoted himself largely to tropical diseases and accomplished much by his studies in Africa and Asia of parasitology, bacteriology and hygiene, investigating rinderpest and surra, the bubonic plague, malaria and sleeping-sickness.
Such rewards as a scientific man may have were given to him. He was appointed in 1885 professor of hygiene in the University of Berlin and director of the Hygienic Institute, then newly established. In 1891 he was appointed director of the new Royal Institute for Infectious Diseases, and became an honorary professor in the university. This institute now forms a part of the Rudolf Virchow Hospital, and is known as the Koch Institute. Koch received the Nobel prize in medicine in 1905. But the rewards that could be given to him were insignificant beside his services.
Of the world's debt to Koch the Journal of the American Medical Association says: "But death has claimed the master and the world has lost its leader in the struggle against infection. Endowed with a mind of the first order, and animated, beneath a quiet, impassive and meditative exterior, by a spirit of unceasing but wonderfully well-regulated activity, which drove him on as by an internal
