OBITUARY.

Otago Witness, 1 June 1910, Page 31

OBITUARY.

DR KOCH

BERLIN, May 28

Professor Koch has succumbed to heartdisease. He died while undergoing the cure at Baden Baden. Dr Robert, Koch was born in 1843 at Klausthal. Hanover. As early as 1876 he isolated the baccilus of anthrax, and some years later proposed a method of preventive inoculation against that disease. In 1882 he demonstrated the bacillus of tuberclo which bears his name; and in the following year, in Egypt and India, he identified the cause of cholera in the comma bacillus. Tuberculin (which he prepared in 1891) is of value as a diag : nostic agent, but as a remedy for phthisis and kind-red human affections it has not fulfilled the high hopes entertained on its introduction. He maintained that tuberculosis in man was a disease distinct from tuberculosis in cattle and other lower animals, and he denied the possibility of the transmission of the disease from lower animals to man. Investigations by Royal Commissions showed, however, that the balance of evidence was against that view. Dr Koch was appoinetd professor at the University of Berlin in 1885, and afterwards director of the Bacteriological Institute at Berlin. Twice, in 1896 and in 1903, he visited South Africa to study rinderpest, and in 1897 be he visited German East Africa to study malaria.