In the popular mind he was perhaps best known as the discoverer of a supposed cure for consumption, a remedy which failed to fulfil the[Pg 185] hopes of an over-expectant public. Yet the tremendous strides made in recent years toward the stamping out of that supposedly incurable disease are due, more than to any other one man, to the great German experimenter. Medical men today freely attribute the striking decrease in the death rate from tuberculosis to Koch’s discovery in 1882 that the disease is infectious. To this achievement he added important studies of malaria, cholera, bubonic plague, rinderpest, cattle plague, splenic fever and wound poison.
Dr. Koch received a medical education at Göttingen. After his graduation, in 1866, he became assistant surgeon in the Hamburg General Hospital. Later he took up private practice at Langenhagen, Hanover; at Rakwitz, Posen; and at Wollstein, Posen. By 1872 he had already a standing in his profession which won him an appointment to the Imperial Board of Health. Ten years later he succeeded in isolating the tubercle bacillus, and his standing as an expert was secure.
Honors followed fast. He was made privy councillor in 1883, and became director of the Cholera Commission to India and Egypt. In 1884 he discovered the cholera spirillum, regarded as the positive test of Asiatic cholera, and for this signal service he received by legislative act a gift of $20,000. The following year he became a professor in the University of Berlin, director of the newly established Hygienic Institute of Berlin, and also director of the Prussian Board of Health.
But so far the winner of scientific honors had escaped the popular notice. It was in November, 1890, that word was suddenly flashed around the world that a German scientist had discovered an infallible remedy for tuberculosis. “Koch’s consumption[Pg 186] cure” became a talismanic phrase of hope to millions. Consumptives rushed to Berlin from every corner of the earth. Men in the last stages of the disease died in railway carriages on their way to the great physician. No one regretted this tragic manifestation more than Dr. Koch. He had known that his experiments were incomplete and that he was not yet ready to put his tuberculin to practical use. He sought to keep it from the public, but sensationalists garbled his modest report, and the mischief was wrought.
Nevertheless, the student continued his work undaunted. The Robert Koch Institute for the investigation of tuberculosis was founded in Berlin. Andrew Carnegie contributed $125,000 to its work. From it has proceeded the most valuable backing of the world-wide war on the white plague.
Dr. Koch’s latest work was the investigation in South Africa of sleeping sickness, in recognition of which Emperor William conferred on him the title of Excellency. From August, 1906, to October, 1907, the doctor and his assistants carried on these investigations on the Sesse Islands, in the Victoria Nyanza. The work was not without its dangers, as the disease manifested itself there in its most virulent form. Natives were dying on all sides. He discovered the origin of the disease in the tsetse fly. To destroy this fly and thus end the scourge he recommended the annihilation of the crocodile, on whose blood the fly feeds.
On one point Dr. Koch differed radically from most other authorities on tuberculosis. He maintained that tuberculosis in cattle was not transferable to man. This position he held to most vigorously at the Tuberculosis Congress in London, in 1901. In 1908, however, when he came to this country to attend the congress at Washington,[Pg 187] he was fated to hear his conclusions voted down by a resolution of the body. He made no reply, and many believe his opinions had been modified. This journey to the United States in 1908 was his first trip to this country and America’s savants strove to pay him the honors due. He was the distinguished guest at a New York dinner. It was there that Andrew Carnegie called him one of the “heroes of civilization.”
Dr. Koch received the Harden medal in recognition of his eminent services to medical science and public health, the Nobel Medicine Prize, amounting to $40,000, for his researches looking to the prevention and cure of tuberculosis, and many minor honors.
The following obituary of a writer, though meagre in biographical detail, is well adapted to convey an impression of her personality and of the quality of her work. It appeared in the New York Sun.
Myra Kelly (Mrs. Allan Macnaughton), affectionately known to many thousands of readers as the writer of stories of Ghetto children, died yesterday in Torquay, England.