It is a remarkable fact that the distinguished
English philosopher of the seventeenth century, the man who more
than anyone else of his century appreciated the importance of the
experimental method, Robert Boyle, had said that he who could discover
the nature of ferments and fermentation, would be more capable than
anyone else of explaining the nature of certain diseases.
In 1876 there appeared in Cohn's "Beitrage zur Morphologie der Pflanzen"
(II, 277-310), a paper on the "AEtiology of Anthrax" by a German
district physician in Wollstein, Robert Koch, which is memorable in our
literature as the starting point of a new method of research into
the causation of infectious diseases. Koch demonstrated the constant
presence of germs in the blood of animals dying from the disease. Years
before, those organisms had been seen by Pollender and Davaine, but
the epoch-making advance of Koch was to grow those organisms in a pure
culture outside the body, and to produce the disease artificially
by inoculating animals with the cultures Koch is really our medical
Galileo, who, by means of a new technique,--pure cultures and isolated
staining,--introduced us to a new world. In 1878, followed his study on
the "AEtiology of Wound Infections," in which he was able to demonstrate
conclusively the association of micro-organisms with the disease.
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