Robert KochBorn 11 Dec 1843; died 27 May 1910 at age 66. (Heinrich Hermann) Robert Koch was a German physician, a founder of the science of bacteriology, who discovered the tubercle bacillus (1882) and the cholera bacillus (1883). He studied bubonic plague in Bombay (1897) and malaria and sleeping sickness in Africa. In addition Koch investigated tropical dysentery, and the Egyptian eye disease (trachoma), and typhus recurrens in tropical Africa. He also carried out work of exceptional importance concerning destructive tropical cattle diseases, such as rinderpest, Surra disease, Texas fever, coast fever in cattle and the trypanosome disease carried by the tsetse fly. He won the Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine in 1905, "for his investigations and discoveries in relation to tuberculosis." |
