The discovery of the bacillus of consumption by no means assured the cure of the disease; but it foretokened the time when a cure would be found.  This prophecy, though it has not yet been clearly fulfilled, is, in the closing years of the century, in process of fulfillment.  The enemy does not readily yield; but such has been the gain in the contest that already within the last twenty years the mortality from consumption of the lungs has fallen off more than forty per cent!  Much of this gain has been made by the reviving confidence of human beings that sooner or later tuberculosis would be destroyed.  Hygiene has done its part; and other circumstances have conduced to the same result.  Though neither Dr. Koch nor any other man living has been able as yet positively to meet and vanquish consumption in open battle, yet the goblin has in a measure been robbed of his terrors.  He is no longer boastful and victorious over the human race.

After the discovery of the tubercle bacillus, the fame of Robert Koch became world-wide.  In the following year he was made a privy councilor, and was placed in charge of an expedition organized by the German government to go into Egypt and India for the investigation of the causes of Asiatic cholera.  The expedition was engaged in this work for nearly a year.  Koch pursued his usual careful method of scientific experimentation.  He exposed himself to the contagion of cholera, but his science and fine constitution stood him well in hand, and he returned unharmed.

It was in May of 1884 that he was able to announce the discovery of the coma bacillus, that is, the bacterium of cholera.  Here, again he had the enemy at bay.  For long ages the Asiatic plague had ravaged the countries of the East with little hindrance to its spread or fatality.  The disease would appear as an epidemic at intervals and sweep all before it.  The wave of death would roll on westward from country to country, until it would subside, as if by exhaustion, in the far west.  Two or three times within the century cholera had been fatally scattered through American cities.  It had spread westward along the rivers of the Ohio and Mississippi valleys, and into country districts, where villages and hamlets were decimated.

The discovery of Koch was a virtual proclamation that this ruin of mankind from the Asiatic plague should cease.  The knowledge that the disease was due to a living bacterium, that without the germ and the spread of the germ the plague could not exist, was a virtual announcement that in the civilized countries it should not any longer exist.

The discoverer was now set high in the estimation of mankind.  Imperial Germany best of all countries rewards its benefactors.  France is fascinated with adventure; Great Britain with slaughter; America with bare political battles; but Germany sees the true thing, and rewards it.  Koch was immediately placed beyond want by his government, and titles and honors came without stint.