54 Background of Work and Study in Public Health 



to make and easily maintain pure cultures of any given organism, 

 namely, from the discovery of the poured-plate method of isola- 

 tion in the year 1881." Not once in pages of his department of 

 science and sanitation in Michigan School Moderator did Smith 

 refer to Koch's invention of a poured plate method nor to Koch's 

 canons or rules of laboratory procedure, published in 1882-1883-.^® 

 These postulates, in great part a more perfect statement of de- 

 siderata taught Koch by Henle, required that the disease be repro- 

 duced and unvaryingly demonstrate the presence of the suspected 

 organism, exclusive of all other matter which might cause the 

 disease, and not once but many times vv^as the isolation procedure 

 to be repeated.^' Of course, the Michigan School Aloderator was 

 not addressed to an audience of experimental scientists. But in 

 1882^^ Smith exulted that 221 persons in Michigan were actively 

 engaged in studying science, although of this number how many 

 were actual or aspiring pathologists was not revealed. During 

 1882-1883 Smith was, at best, a beginner in bacteriology. Having 

 no research laboratory affiliation, he had not reached the point of 

 learning laboratory procedure. 



This was less true of generic nomenclature in bacteriology, 

 which later was believed by him to have been really begun with 

 Ferdinand Cohn's first morphological classification of the bac- 

 teria, which was prepared between the years 1870 and 1875. Some 

 classification of different forms of the bacteria was contained in 

 Dr. Sternberg's translation of Antoine Magnin's treatise. The Bac- 

 teria. Presumably, Smith in 1882 ^^ drew from this source his 

 popularly intended definitions of Bacillus subtilis as " found in 

 rancid fats and . . . the cause of the butyric ferment " and Bacillus 

 anthracis as occurring " in the blood of animals sick of splenic 

 fever." In 1872 Cohn had formed his new genus Bacillus, 

 founded chiefly on Bacillus subtilis and including Bacillus ulna 

 and Bacillus anthracis, the last representing. Smith believed, " a 

 sort of afterthought," since he had never studied the organism 



®* Robert Koch, Ueber die milzbrandimpfung, eine entgegnung auf den von 

 Pasteur in genf gehaltenen vortrag, Kassel und Berlin, Theodor Fischer, 1882. 

 The same in French. Theodor Fischer, 1883. 



*^ Cecelia C. Mettler, History of medicine, ed. by Fred A. Mettler, 263-264, 

 Toronto, Blakiston Co., 1947; see also, F. H. Garrison, Introduction to the history 

 of medicine, op. cit., 579, and authorities cited. 



^^ Michit^an School Moderator 2 (19): 938, Jan. 26, 1882. 



^^ Michigan School Moderutor 3 (13): 199, November 30, 1882. 



