70 Background of Work and Study in Public Health 



a graduate of the University of St. Petersburg. He studied also 

 at the University of Heidelberg; and he spent some time in I860 

 with Gustave Thuret and E. Bornet at Antibes, France, studying 

 Mediterranean algae. Smith later wrote of him: "As early as 

 1880 his name was known in every quarter of the globe as a very 

 original and distinguished investigator, possessed not only of 

 unusual powers of observation, but endowed with a genius for 

 painstaking, so that his papers remain models of lucid presenta- 

 tion and convincing illustration." He tabulated the famous Rus- 

 sian scientist's papers, those done alone and those with DeBary, 

 and among those v/hich he regarded as "wonderfully illumi- 

 nating" v/as his paper on the club root of cabbage (Plasmodio- 

 phora) which we shall consider again later. 



If, during the early 1880's, Smith was studying the accessible 

 literature on diseases of plants, his interest in the subject could not 

 have been primary and was quite unlike his enthusiasms for syste- 

 matic botany and the literature of animal and human pathology. 

 The last was a part of his daily work. His botanical interest had 

 never failed him; but botany, either as an independent instruc- 

 tional entity or a practiced profession, was almost unknown in 

 America, especially in the " west." Botany was still an adjunct of 

 "natural history" or the natural sciences. Even in the eastern 

 states, for the most part it was a taxonomist's science. As late as 

 1883 one major laboratory equipped for real experimental re- 

 search in plant physiology existed, and that was at Harvard Uni- 

 versity under George Lincoln Goodale. Some other laboratories 

 had been equipped for undergraduate instruction. Professor 

 Beal's laboratory at Michigan Agricultural College was one, and 

 from there Smith could have acquired some modern knowledge of 

 laboratory procedures and methods. Beal's and Dr. Bessey's 

 laboratories were modelled after those at Harvard. 



No laboratory in the United States for the study of human, 

 animal, or plant diseases, however, was yet comparable to the 

 laboratory of the Imperial Health Department in Berlin, to which 

 in 1880 Robert Koch had been appointed. During the early 1860's 

 Louis Pasteur had held a professorship at Lille. ^''^ But, mainly, 

 his work had been done in Paris at the Ecole Normale, and the 



^"^ The influence of Pasteur on medical science, op. cit., 327. 



