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| Country Doctor with a Private Research Lab |
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In the fall of 1872 Dr. Robert Koch received the post of District Medical Officer in Wollstein (today: Wolsztyn, Poland). Here in a makeshift laboratory, far removed from the hubbub of university research institutes, he continued doing what had fascinated him right from his childhood days: working with a microscope. He now started to examine the blood and tissue of animals which had died of anthrax. With his systematic search for pathogens using the microscope, he created the basis of modern bacteriology.
| Research into Anthrax and Wound Infections |
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In 1876, in the aqueous humor of an ox’s eye, Robert Koch succeeded in breeding the rod-shaped bacilli observed under the microscope by von Pollender in 1849. Using his microscope (from E. Hartnack), he observed their growth and witnessed the spore formation process. Detection under the microscope, breeding of the organism in pure cultures and subsequent transmission to experimental animals was the systematic sequence he followed in the performance of his experiments.
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| Wolsztyn in Poland today. | Anthrax pathogen: drawing by R. Koch. | Fluorescence photograph. |
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This all verified that the anthrax bacillus or its spores are the specific pathogens causing the disease, and that the burying of the animal corpses did not suffice to kill the spores but actually promoted their formation. – The botanist Ferdinand Cohn (1828–1898) in Breslau encouraged Robert Koch to systematically continue with the approach he had taken in his work. In 1876, in his journal “Papers on the Biology of Plants”, he published Koch’s paper entitled “The Etiology of Anthrax, Based on the Developmental History of the Anthrax Bacillus”.
Convinced that every wound infection was triggered by a specific pathogen, Koch devoted his attention to the examination of infectious wound diseases. In 1878 he published his results in two papers: “New Studies on the Microorganisms Involved in Infectious Wound Diseases” and “Studies on the Etiology of Infectious Wound Diseases”.
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