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
