Among the personal agencies by which cholera has been excluded from Europe and America, first and greatest is Dr. Robert Koch, of Berlin.  He, more than any other one man, has contributed to the glorious exemption.  Dr. Koch, now by the favor of his Emperor, Baron Koch, is one of those heroic spirits who go before the human race exploring the route, casting up a highway and gathering out the stones.  Thus shall the feet of the oncoming millions be not bruised and their shouts of joy be not turned to lamentation.

Robert Koch was born at Klausthal, in the Hartz mountains, on the eleventh of December, 1843.  He is a German of the Germans.  In his youth he was a student of medicine at Goettingen, where at the age of twenty-three he took his first degree.  He was by nature and from his boyhood a devotee of science.  For about ten years he practiced his profession, but continued his studies with indefatigable zeal.  The investigations of Pasteur had already filled Europe with applause when Koch, following on the same lines of scientific exploration, began to enlarge the borders of knowledge.  He became a bacteriologist of the first rank.  He began to investigate the causes and nature of contagion; but as late as 1876 his name was still unknown in the cyclopaedias.

Koch was twenty-one years the junior of Pasteur; but his enthusiasm and genius now bore him rapidly to a fame as great as that of his predecessor.  His first remarkable achievement was a demonstration of the cause and cure of splenic fever in cattle.  He showed, just as Pasteur had done in similar cases, that the plague in question was due to the specific poison of a bacterium, and that the disease might be cured by inoculation against it.  This he proceeded to do, and the demonstration and good work brought him to the attention of the old Emperor.  Dr. Koch was made a member of the Imperial Board of Health in Berlin.

A greater discovery was already at the door.  Dr. Koch began a careful investigation into the nature of consumption.  His discovery of the germ of splenic fever, and that of chicken cholera, as well as the general results in this direction in other laboratories of Europe, led him to the conjecture that consumption also is a zymotic or bacterial disease.  His inquiry into this subject began in 1879, and extended to March of 1882.  On that day, in a paper before the Physiological Society of Berlin, he announced the discovery of the tubercle bacillus.  He was able to demonstrate the existence of the germ of consumption, and to describe its methods of life, as well as the character of his ravages.

Here then at last was laid bare the true origin of the most fatal disease which has ever afflicted mankind.  He who has not informed himself with respect to the almost universal prevalence of consumption among the nations of the earth, or taken note of the mortality from that dreaded enemy, by which nearly one-sixth of the human race sooner or later perishes, will not have realized the awful character of this enemy.  To attack such a foe, to force him into a corner, even as Siegfried did the Grendel in his cavern, was an achievement of which the greatest of mankind might well be proud.