Notable Events of the Nineteenth Century / Great Deeds of Men and Nations and the Progress of the World

by Unknown

Civilization has never appeared to a better advantage than in the building of her defences against the westward invasion of cholera. There have been times within two decades of the present when in the countries east of the Red Sea 3000 people have died daily of the Asiatic plague. Egypt has been ravaged. The ports of the Mediterranean have been successfully invaded. Commerce, reckless of everything except her own interests, has taken the infection on shipboard, and sailed with it to foreign lands, as though it were a precious cargo! Importers, anxious for merchandise, have stood ready to receive the plague, and plant it without regard to consequences. But in the midst of all this, a new power has arisen in the world, and standing with face to the east, has drawn a sword, before the circle of which even the spectral shadow of cholera has quailed and gone back! Humanity might well break out in rhapsody and jubilee over this great victory.

Among the personal agencies by which cholera has been excluded from Europe and America, first and greatest is Dr. Robert Koch, of Berlin. He, more than any other one man, has contributed to the glorious exemption. Dr. Koch, now by the favor of his Emperor, Baron Koch, is one of those heroic spirits who go before the human race exploring the route, casting up a highway and gathering out the stones. Thus shall the feet of the oncoming millions be not bruised and their shouts of joy be not turned to lamentation.

Robert Koch was born at Klausthal, in the Hartz mountains, on the eleventh of December, 1843. He is a German of the Germans. In his youth he was a student of medicine at Göttingen, where at the age of twenty-three he took his first degree. He was by nature and from his boyhood a devotee of science. For about ten years he practiced his profession, but continued his studies with indefatigable zeal. The investigations of Pasteur had already filled Europe with applause when Koch, following on the same lines of scientific exploration, began to enlarge the borders of knowledge. He became a bacteriologist of the first rank. He began to investigate the causes and nature of contagion; but as late as 1876 his name was still unknown in the cyclopædias.

Koch was twenty-one years the junior of Pasteur; but his enthusiasm and genius now bore him rapidly to a fame as great as that of his predecessor. His first remarkable achievement was a demonstration of the cause and cure of splenic fever in cattle. He showed, just as Pasteur had done in similar cases, that the plague in question was due to the specific poison of a bacterium, and that the disease might be cured by inoculation against it. This he proceeded to do, and the demonstration and good work brought him to the attention of the old Emperor. Dr. Koch was made a member of the Imperial Board of Health in Berlin.

A greater discovery was already at the door. Dr. Koch began a careful investigation into the nature of consumption. His discovery of the germ of splenic fever, and that of chicken cholera, as well as the general results in this direction in other laboratories of Europe, led him to the conjecture that consumption also is a zymotic or bacterial disease. His inquiry into this subject began in 1879, and extended to March of 1882. On that day, in a paper before the Physiological Society of Berlin, he announced the discovery of the tubercle bacillus. He was able to demonstrate the existence of the germ of consumption, and to describe its methods of life, as well as the character of his ravages.

Here then at last was laid bare the true origin of the most fatal disease which has ever afflicted mankind. He who has not informed himself with respect to the almost universal prevalence of consumption among the nations of the earth, or taken note of the mortality from that dreaded enemy, by which nearly one-sixth of the human race sooner or later perishes, will not have realized the awful character of this enemy. To attack such a foe, to force him into a corner, even as Siegfried did the Grendel in his cavern, was an achievement of which the greatest of mankind might well be proud.

The discovery of the bacillus of consumption by no means assured the cure of the disease; but it foretokened the time when a cure would be found. This prophecy, though it has not yet been clearly fulfilled, is, in the closing years of the century, in process of fulfillment. The enemy does not readily yield; but such has been the gain in the contest that already within the last twenty years the mortality from consumption of the lungs has fallen off more than forty per cent! Much of this gain has been made by the reviving confidence of human beings that sooner or later tuberculosis would be destroyed. Hygiene has done its part; and other circumstances have conduced to the same result. Though neither Dr. Koch nor any other man living has been able as yet positively to meet and vanquish consumption in open battle, yet the goblin has in a measure been robbed of his terrors. He is no longer boastful and victorious over the human race.

After the discovery of the tubercle bacillus, the fame of Robert Koch became world-wide. In the following year he was made a privy councilor, and was placed in charge of an expedition organized by the German government to go into Egypt and India for the investigation of the causes of Asiatic cholera. The expedition was engaged in this work for nearly a year. Koch pursued his usual careful method of scientific experimentation. He exposed himself to the contagion of cholera, but his science and fine constitution stood him well in hand, and he returned unharmed.

It was in May of 1884 that he was able to announce the discovery of the coma bacillus, that is, the bacterium of cholera. Here, again he had the enemy at bay. For long ages the Asiatic plague had ravaged the countries of the East with little hindrance to its spread or fatality. The disease would appear as an epidemic at intervals and sweep all before it. The wave of death would roll on westward from country to country, until it would subside, as if by exhaustion, in the far west. Two or three times within the century cholera had been fatally scattered through American cities. It had spread westward along the rivers of the Ohio and Mississippi valleys, and into country districts, where villages and hamlets were decimated.

The discovery of Koch was a virtual proclamation that this ruin of mankind from the Asiatic plague should cease. The knowledge that the disease was due to a living bacterium, that without the germ and the spread of the germ the plague could not exist, was a virtual announcement that in the civilized countries it should not any longer exist.