Microbe hunters

Two hundred and fifty years ago an obscure man named Leeuwenhoek looked for the first time into a mysterious new world peopled with a thousand different kinds of tiny beings, so...

“Leeuwenhoek is dead, it is too bad, it is a loss that cannot be made good. Who now will carry on the study of the little animals?” asked the learned men of the Royal Society in...

In 1831, thirty-two years after the magnificent Spallanzani died, microbe hunting had come to a standstill once more. The sub-visible animals were despised and forgotten while o...

In those astounding and exciting years between 1860 and 1870, when Pasteur was saving vinegar industries and astonishing emperors and finding out what ailed sick silkworms, a sm...

Do not think for a moment that Pasteur allowed his fame and name to be forgotten in the excitement kicked up by the sensational proofs of Koch that microbes murder men. It is ce...

Émile Roux, the fanatical helper of Pasteur, in 1888 took up the tools his master had laid down, and started on searches of his own. In a little while he discovered a strange po...

A janitor with no proper education was the first man to see microbes; a chemist put them on the map and made people properly afraid of them; a country doctor turned the hunting...

It was Theobald Smith who made mankind turn a corner. He was the first, and remains the captain of American microbe hunters. He poked his nose--following the reasoning of some p...

“Young man!”--the face of the Director-General of the British Army Medical Service changed from an irritated red to an indignant mauve-color--“young man, I will send you to Indi...

The last ten years of the nineteenth century were as unfortunate for ticks, bugs, and gnats as they were glorious for the microbe hunters. Theobald Smith had started them off by...

Everybody is agreed that Walter Reed--head of the Yellow Fever Commission--was a courteous man and a blameless one, that he was a mild man and a logical: there is not one partic...

Two hundred and fifty years ago, Antony Leeuwenhoek, who was a matter-of-fact man, looked through a magic eye, saw microbes, and so began this history. He would certainly have s...