ROBERT Koni. Sl',") 



ROBERT KOCH (1843-1910) 



Foreign Honorary Member in Class II, Section 4, 1001. 



Robert Koch died IVIay 27, 1910, in his sixty-seventh year. He was 

 born in Klaustal; was one of thirteen children; eleven sons and two 

 daughters. 



He was at first intended to be a tradesman, but later was allowed to 

 carry out his own desire, which was to study medicine. 



In April, 1862, at the age of eighteen, he entered the University of 

 Gottingen, and devoted himself to the study of mathematics, physics 

 and botany. The physiologist, Meissner, and the pathologist, Henle 

 had a special influence upon him during his stay here. In his second 

 semester, he was made an assistant in the Pathological Museum, and 

 shortly after took an academic prize. 



In January, 1866, he took his Doctor's examination in Gottingen, 

 and in March of the same year, after a short stay in Berlin, passed 

 his state examination with great distinction at Hanover. He then 

 spent a month as an assistant in the General Hospital of Hamburg, 

 and from October, 1866 to July, 1868, combined general practice with 

 that of physician to the Idiot's Hospital of Langenhagen near Han- 

 over. He then practised a short time in Xeimegk in Brandenburg, 

 and from 1869 in Rakwitz in the province of Posen. Prom Rakwitz 

 he went as a volunteer surgeon to the war against France; returning 

 home — at the suggestion of one of his friends, he passed the exami- 

 nation for, and until 1872 served as. District Physician in Wollstein 

 near Rakwitz. 



In spite of all the interruptions that come to a busy practitioner, 

 Koch had found time for microscopic studies during the preceding 

 years, but it was first in Wollstein that, thanks to his impro\ed 

 financial condition, he secured better apparatus and instruments and 

 could control his time better. He cut off half his consulting room for a 

 laboratory, in which was installed a photomicrographic apparatus and 

 a dark room. It was in this room that the young District Physician 

 and busy practitioner made the discoveries that stamped him as a 

 master of knowledge. The aims of his life stood now clear before 

 his eyes. He threw a search-light on the darkness surrounding the 

 infectious diseases: he placed the old, much disputed doctrine of 



