The Indianapolis journal. [volume] (Indianapolis [Ind.]) 1867-1904, 1901-08-03
DR.. KOCH ONCONSUMPTION
LIFE AND IMPORTANT WORK OF
III FAMOUS GERMAN SCIENTIST.
For Twenty-Five Years He Has Been
sion of Tubercular Disease.
Talcott Wiliams. in Philadelphia Press.

bacillus of consumption, is a short-nOsed,
long-haired man. with brown hair. five
and One-half feet high, chunky and round
shouldered. who has been conspicuously be-
fore the worlds eye for twenty years and
for ten years more known 10 the world Of
science. For thirty years he has. there
fore, done part of the worlds thinking,
most of it on the deadliest disease known
TO man.
He is that new thing produced in the
last generation-the man of pure science
and research. Whatever else he has done
has been subsidiary 70 that. He came
OF an educated strain. His father was
a mining engineer and in the state serv-
Joe. His mother had thirteen children. AS
seven of them were sons, born in success
sion, she received a piece OF silver plate
from the King for her share in adding 10
his army. DR.. Koch will be ffty-eight on
I Dec. IL next. He had the enormous ad-
vantage of an early intellectual life. He
had accustomed himself TO the use of the
microscope before he was ten. His eye got
its trained habits of close attention in that
field exactly as the Shikar's sons come TO
know the jungle spoor, by instinct. He was
ready to enter the university at Gottingen
a year before the law allowed. He won his
first big prize there in his second year. He
was twenty-three when he took his doctors
degree in 1866 and began the practice of a
country doctor. His father, with thirteen
children to educate. had naturally nothing
with which to start him and Robert kocn
was cut off from laboratory and hospital
by the necessity of earning his living. The
most that he could do was to get appointed
"Physikus," or, as we should say, health
board physician. On the German plan OF
competitive examinations for these posts a
future Koch has the best chance 10 get
them. If the plan on which health board
physicians are appointed in this city, with
a pull" as a large ingredient. has placed
a future Koch among them the fact has
not yet been discovered. In the sparsely
settled farming district of Posen, where his
practice lay, DR.. Koch had few patients. de
had many cattle, a microscope and test
tubes. There was a break when he served
for two years as surgeon during the FRAN
co-Prussian war. seeing much of wounds
later to be of service, for on this he has
published an important paper.
HIS FIRST DISCOVERY.
Microscope, test tubes, cattle and spare
leisure were enough. Twenty years before,
in 1850, DR.. Delevaine had found in animals
afflicted with anthrax or splenic fever a
minute rodlike creature, which he thought
was associated with the disease. That fact
had slumbered for twenty years. Any man
with a microscope, patience, ~gelatine and
a sick animal might have discovered it. No
one had. Koch did. At thirty he was an
unknown country doctor, trudging over
rough roads for fees of a mark. At thirty
five his discovery had placed the world at
his feet. He was made government adviser
in the Imperial Health Department. He
had his own laboratory, four army sur
geons were acting as assistants and a
group of seventy-fve students were study
ing under him. This splendid machine
Koch's brain, it's directing head, liberal
government support, its motive power, a
small group of trained investigators. its
organic center. and it's workers, a great
swarm of active, ambitious, energetic,
! picked students, the natural selection OF the
laboratories of the civilized w~orld-for dur
Koch has been the dream of every ambi-
ology in aSp any co5ahtry Of the world~has
pushed it's discovering way steadily on
through over twenty years, since 1879, when
Or. Koch began his organized work.
DIR. Koch never would have won his
! scientific position without his own individ-
ual energy. ability and initiative, but he
never could have continued IL If a wise gov
eminent, relieving him of teaching, burden
ing him with no administration. asking him
save as his research demanded to see to no
patients, to walk no hospital. to do nothing
but TO devote himself TO the one thing that
he could do, had not made ii possible TO
carry on discovery on a scale unknown
elsewhere. No other country supports just
such a machine, though one could be set up
here in Philadelphia if an were
provided equal TO the sum which any one of
a dozen rich men in the last twenty years
have put into single houses about which
the only certain thing Is that the son will
not want IL.
LIFE AND WORK IN BERLIN.
BY thirty-five DR.. Koch had linked the
disease anthrax to a bacillus so that every
one knew that one was the cause of the
other. He had made it's cultivation as
easy by new methods as the plants that
grow in a back yard. He had devised a
series Of tests by which one bacillus could
be known from another. His paper on
this subject in 1850. just before he left
his country practice at Wallstein, grouped
and systematized the identification of mi
mute organisms. That these organisms
had caused disease had been known. The
work in the last twenty-five years in which
DR.. Koch has been only one Of the many
workers, Pasteur eqIaling him in indi-
vidual discovery, has been OF linking each
germ disease with its particular organism.
deVising a way for testing these organisms
and discovering a method either for pre-
venting them or for destroying them after
they have seized man or animal. Pre-
vention lies along two paths. either by
excluding them from the body or by rem
dering the body immune to its action. Cure
consists In applying some medicament pois-
onous to the bacterium, but not too pois-
onous for the patient. For most germs.
exclusion is the only prevention. for some
immunity can be secured by incubation.
for a few. and only by a very few. a direct
remedy has been found.
With his call to Berlin DR.. Koch
stepped into that round white ring of sci
entific light in which Is done the work of
men whom the scientific world is watch
ing. He had his apparatus and machine
for investigation, the best anywhere. He
was master Of his own time. He devel-
oped. as the German professor does. his
personal idiosyncrasies. Less than other
men of distinction does the German pro-
lessor have the ameliorating effect of
contact with the better side of agree
able human life. Working at night DIR.
Koch rises late. The Berlin CORRESPONDENT
of the Daily News wrote of him in 1890
that he breakfasted at 9 without coffee
which he breaks an enormous quantity of
black toasted bread. on this awful dish.
which is doubtless germicidal. he works
in his laboratory until Z. Then he takes
his dinner, in which he eats soup after
the pudding. He rides a pure white horse
each afternoon. from which one concludes
that the able doctor is a better bacterial
ogist than he is horseman. and prefers
a horse in which age has whitened the
hair and tanned the temper. His sumner
is a complicated affair of several meats
He is an Alpine climber. He has thar
share OF personal contact with his friends
which the German loves and reserves from
the busiest life. Mr.. Conan Doyle pro-
nounced him in 1880 "a married man ard
Of a domestic turn Of mind. his life spent
either in the complete privacy Of his fam
lily or in the absorbing labor Of his labor
atory. Just three years after the novel
ist expressed this opinion the Berlin courts
awarded DR.. Koch's wife a divorce from
him and an order TO paw her one-fo,rfb
| NJ his innnpna uFhffa 1...f