PRHPARATOin TO Rl.SllAKCH CaRUI-R 39 



Jcncc adduced durint; the last few years in support of the ' anti- 

 toxinc ■ theory." By 1892 Elie Mctchnikoff s " brilliant phagocyte 

 theory" was believed to embody "at most only a partial explana- 

 tion of the facts of immunity." 



Some idea of the thrilling cjuarter-century in which lirwin Smith 

 was to be educated and acquire his early learning in pathology 

 and bacteriology may be deduced from another quotation from 

 this review. The reviewer, seeing in the growing science of bac- 

 teriology a partial, if not complete, vindication of the practical 

 worth of "pure science," said of this period: "To have given to 

 tl;e world for the first time a rational theory of infectious disease, 

 and to have indicated the therapeutic possibilities of the future 

 are achievements that may well make the last quarter of the nine- 

 teenth century memorable in his history of human progress." 



Before Dr. Sternberg published his manual which became a 

 standard one for the new science, he enlarged and revised to the 

 year 1884 his translation of Magnin's treatise on bacteria. His 

 career as an army surgeon had provided him with exceptional 

 opportunities for studying epidemic diseases."^ In 1867, while 

 stationed at Fort Harker, Kansas, he had been on the scene of a 

 serious cholera epidemic; in fact, lost his wife from the disease. 

 In 1871 at Fort Columbus, New York, and a few years later at 

 Barrancas, Florida, he had observed the ravages of yellow fever; 

 and in 1879 served as a member of the Havana yellow fever com- 

 mission. For a decade thereafter he worked on the etiolog)^ of this 

 disease, and years later when an army board was sent to Cuba to 

 study the contagion and its transmission he, as Surgeon General, 

 w^as primarily responsible for the government's sponsoring the 

 commission." 



The study of scientific disinfection is believed "^ to have been 

 started by Dr. Robert Koch in Germany and Dr. Sternberg in 

 America. In 1878, while stationed at Walla Walla, Washington, 

 the young American army surgeon had begun experiments to test 



"^ Drs. Howard A. Kelly and Walter L. Burrage, George Miller Sternberg (1838- 

 1915), Dictionary of American Medical Biography, 1158-1160, N. Y. and London, 

 D. Appleton & Co., 1928. 



^' E. F. Smith wrote of this: " Sternberg, the bacteriologist, was Surgeon General 

 at the time and without his warm support nothing would or could have been done." 

 See, Dr. Smith's address, Fifty years of pathology, given in 1926, Proc. Internal. 

 Congr. of Plant Sciences 1:31, 1929. 



'^ Drs. Kelly and Burrage, op. cit. 



