920 



SCIENCE 



[N. a Vol. XXXVIII. No. 991 



EDWIN KLEBS (1834-191S) 

 With the death of Edwin Klebs at Bern, 

 Switzerland, on October 25, 1913, there passed 

 away the last of the great pioneers of the bac- 

 terial theory of infection, a pupil of Virchow, 

 a contemporary of Pasteur and, in a very defi- 

 nite sense, the inspirer of Koch. Born at 

 Konigsberg in 1834, Klebs was an East Prus- 

 sian and the peculiar effect of his character 

 upon his work, a certain discontinuity in the 

 latter, was due to the Slavic element in his 

 composition. He was a peripatetic all his 

 life and, after serving as Virchow's assistant 

 at Berlin (1861-66), he was successively pro- 

 fessor of pathology at Bern (1866), Wiirtzburg 

 (1872), Prague (1873), Zurich (1882) and 

 Chicago (Eush Medical College, 1896), after 

 which he lived in retirement at Dortmund and 

 Bern. During all this time he was a promi- 

 nent worker in all branches of pathology and 

 in the truest sense a precursor in the bacterial 

 theory of disease. Indeed, his greatest service 

 to medicine was, perhaps, the important influ- 

 ence he exerted upon the pathologists of his 

 time, leading them away from the solidist 

 theories of Virchow and winning them over to 

 the view that post-mortem findings are only 

 end results and that infectious diseases are 

 caused by microorganisms and their chemical 

 products. Koch himself admitted, in a private 

 letter, that he owed much to Klebs, who had 

 been the actual path-breaker in many of the 

 new fields followed by the younger men. Up 

 to 1876, Klebs was the leading protagonist of 

 the modern theory of specific infections 

 (Pasteur did not begin to work in anthrax 

 until about 1880), and, by actual priority of 

 publication, he preceded Koch in the study of 

 bacterial wound infections (1871) and in the 

 technique of growing bacterial cultures in 

 special media (hens' eggs in the first instance). 

 During his Wiirzburg period, his idea of ob- 

 taining pure cultures of pathogenic micro- 

 organisms was actually laughed at as an idle 

 dream. Long before Pasteur and Joubert, he 

 showed that the blood of anthrax is not patho- 

 genic after filtration (1871) ; in other words 

 that the virus of the disease is non-filterable. 

 From this idea, it was but a step for Loeffler to 



reason and to prove that diseases may be 

 caused by "filterable viruses" (1898). Klebs 

 saw the typhoid bacillus before Eberth (1881), 

 the diphtheria bacillus before Loeffler (1883), 

 investigated the tubercle bacilli of cold-blooded 

 animals and their therapeutic possibilities be- 

 fore Friedmann (1900), inoculated monkeys 

 with syphilis before Metchnikoff (1878), first 

 investigated the bacteriology of gun-shot 

 wounds (1872), first produced bovine infection 

 of Perlsucht by feeding with milk (1873), first 

 investigated the infectious nature of endo- 

 carditis (1878), and made the first exhaustive 

 study of acromegaly (1884). Meanwhile, his 

 two pathological treatises of 1869-76 and 

 1887-89 were acknowledged masterpieces in 

 the older field of descriptive or morphological 

 pathology, of which he was the leading expo- 

 nent after Eokitansky and Virchow and in 

 which Chiari is one of the few surviving work- 

 ers. Klebs's definite abandonment of the solid- 

 ist or " end result " pathology dates from his 

 discourses of 1878 and 1882, which are defi- 

 nitely eontra-Virchow, although nothing could 

 be more courteous and reasonable than his 

 attitude in joining issue with his old teacher 

 and friend. In bringing the weak-kneed over 

 to the modern view, his propagandism was of 

 the broadest and most impersonal character. 

 After 1876-8, Klebs's work was definitely over- 

 shadowed by Koch's great papers on anthrax 

 and the traumatic infectious diseases, and his 

 influence began to wane. It may be asked, 

 why did this remarkable man not reap the 

 fruits of his brilliant labors? Why is he not 

 better known to-day? Some may find the an- 

 swer in Lord Woolsey's dictum that "he alone 

 is a good general who follows up his victories." 

 But this reproach can not entirely be cast up 

 to Klebs. His work was constantly inter- 

 rupted by such occurrences as the revolution in 

 Prague and the intrigues and internecine 

 wrangles which sometimes go on among uni- 

 versity professors. His temperament was rest- 

 less, sensitive, impulsive and combative, and, 

 being wrapped up in the original ideas which 

 were always coming to him, he had a tendency 

 to leave work of an important character to his 

 assistants, which was not to his advantage. 



