German bacteriologist born in Clausthal, today Clausthal-Zellerfeld, Germany, one of the greatest bacteriologists of all time and famous for being the discoverer of the tuberculosis bacillus, the vibrio of cholera and the origin of sleeping sickness, which earned him the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine (1905). He entered the University of Göttingen (1862), where he studied botany, physics and mathematics and where he began his successful career in bacteriology, isolating various disease-causing bacteria and their animal vectors, including tuberculosis, graduating in medicine (1866).
After a brief period at the Hamburg General Hospital and at an institute for retarded children, he worked as a rural doctor and, during the Franco-Prussian War, was a surgeon. He began to devote himself to private research, initially in archeology and anthropology and, in medicine, in the field of caused diseases. by poisoning, from where he entered the field of emerging bacteriology (1870s), influenced by the conclusions of the researchers Friedrich Henle and Casimir Davaine had discovered (1840s) that some diseases were caused by organisms. microscopic.
He first discovered the anthrax or anthrax bacillus, Bacillus anthracis, demonstrated the formation of spores in his bacilli, and invented a method of culturing and isolating bacteria (1876). Two years later (1878) iodine began to be used as an antiseptic. After completing important work in the bacteriology of infected wounds, he was appointed by the government adviser. from the Imperial Health Department in Berlin (1880), where he began to develop his research for the rest of his career. He then published his studies on tuberculosis (1881) and soon after announced the isolation of the bacillus that caused the disease (1882), which came to be called Koch's bacillus.
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Then (1883) he was on an official mission to Egypt and India, in order to study the etiology of cholera, and in the following year he managed to prove that the agent of the disease was Vibrio comma. The University of Berlin created the Chair of Hygiene (1885) for him and the Institute of Diseases was created there. Infectious (1891), especially dedicated to research on tuberculosis, leprosy, cholera, malaria and bacteria anaerobic.
Over the next decade, the scientist dedicated himself to researching various human and animal diseases, such as leprosy, rinderpest, bubonic plague and malaria, and he died in Baden-Baden, Germany. At the time, the mechanism for spreading malaria was unknown, but he was almost convinced that the mosquito was the transmitting agent of the disease. Considered, along with Pasteur, the creator of Medical Bacteriology, this scientist is due to the main techniques of the studies of bacteriology, forming, in his time, a generation of researchers, including Paul Ehrlich, who discovered the first remedy against syphilis.
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Source: Biographies - Academic Unit of Civil Engineering / UFCG
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