There was a great _negative_ reason for the success of the World's
Columbian Exposition. The cholera did NOT come! It is quite
true that there is no _if_ in history; but IF the cholera had
come, IF the plague had broken out in our imperial Chicago,
what would have become of the Columbian Exposition? Certainly the Man
of Genoa would have had to seek elsewhere for a great international
gathering in his honor.
The cholera did not arrive, although it was expected. The antecedent
conditions of its coming were all present; but it came not. The
American millions discerned that the dreaded plague was at bay; a
feeling of security and confidence prevailed; the summer of 1893 went
by, and not a single case of Asiatic cholera appeared west of the
Alleghenies. We are not sure that a single case appeared on the
mainland of North America. And why not?
It was because the increasing knowledge of mankind, reinforced with
philanthropy and courage, had drawn a line north and south across
Western Europe, and had said, _Thus far and no farther_. Indeed, there
were several lines drawn. The movement of cholera westward from the
Orient began to be obstructed even before it reached Germany. It was
obstructed in Italy. It was obstructed seriously on the meridian of
the Rhine. It was obstructed almost finally at the meridian of London.
It was completely and gloriously obstructed at the harbor of New York.
Civilization has never appeared to a better advantage than in the
building of her defences against the westward invasion of cholera.
There have been times within two decades of the present when in the
countries east of the Red Sea 3000 people have died daily of the
Asiatic plague. Egypt has been ravaged. The ports of the Mediterranean
have been successfully invaded. Commerce, reckless of everything
except her own interests, has taken the infection on shipboard, and
sailed with it to foreign lands, as though it were a precious cargo!
Importers, anxious for merchandise, have stood ready to receive the
plague, and plant it without regard to consequences. But in the midst
of all this, a new power has arisen in the world, and standing with
face to the east, has drawn a sword, before the circle of which even
the spectral shadow of cholera has quailed and gone back! Humanity
might well break out in rhapsody and jubilee over this great victory.
Among the personal agencies by which cholera has been excluded from
Europe and America, first and greatest is Dr. Robert Koch, of Berlin.
He, more than any other one man, has contributed to the glorious
exemption. Dr. Koch, now by the favor of his Emperor, Baron Koch, is
one of those heroic spirits who go before the human race exploring the
route, casting up a highway and gathering out the stones. Thus shall
the feet of the oncoming millions be not bruised and their shouts of
joy be not turned to lamentation.
Robert Koch was born at Klausthal, in the Hartz mountains, on the
eleventh of December, 1843. He is a German of the Germans. In his
youth he was a student of medicine at Göttingen, where at the age of
twenty-three he took his first degree. He was by nature and from his
boyhood a devotee of science. For about ten years he practiced his
profession, but continued his studies with indefatigable zeal. The
investigations of Pasteur had already filled Europe with applause when
Koch, following on the same lines of scientific exploration, began to
enlarge the borders of knowledge. He became a bacteriologist of the
first rank. He began to investigate the causes and nature of
contagion; but as late as 1876 his name was still unknown in the
cyclopædias.
Koch was twenty-one years the junior of Pasteur; but his enthusiasm
and genius now bore him rapidly to a fame as great as that of his
predecessor. His first remarkable achievement was a demonstration of
the cause and cure of splenic fever in cattle. He showed, just as
Pasteur had done in similar cases, that the plague in question was due
to the specific poison of a bacterium, and that the disease might be
cured by inoculation against it. This he proceeded to do, and the
demonstration and good work brought him to the attention of the old
Emperor. Dr. Koch was made a member of the Imperial Board of Health in
Berlin.
A greater discovery was already at the door. Dr. Koch began a careful
investigation into the nature of consumption. His discovery of the
germ of splenic fever, and that of chicken cholera, as well as the
general results in this direction in other laboratories of Europe, led
him to the conjecture that consumption also is a zymotic or bacterial
disease. His inquiry into this subject began in 1879, and extended to
March of 1882. On that day, in a paper before the Physiological
Society of Berlin, he announced the discovery of the _tubercle
bacillus_. He was able to demonstrate the existence of the germ of
consumption, and to describe its methods of life, as well as the
character of his ravages.
Here then at last was laid bare the true origin of the most fatal
disease which has ever afflicted mankind. He who has not informed
himself with respect to the almost universal prevalence of consumption
among the nations of the earth, or taken note of the mortality from
that dreaded enemy, by which nearly one-sixth of the human race sooner
or later perishes, will not have realized the awful character of this
enemy. To attack such a foe, to force him into a corner, even as
Siegfried did the Grendel in his cavern, was an achievement of which
the greatest of mankind might well be proud.
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.
The Empire would fain have such a man at the seat of power. Dr. Koch
was, in 1885, made a professor in the University of Berlin. The new
chair of Hygiene was created for him, and he was made Director of the
Hygienic Institute. It was in this capacity that armed with influence
and authority and having the resources of the government virtually at
his disposal, he directed in the great scientific work by which a
bulwark against cholera was drawn almost literally across Europe, and
was defended as if with the mounted soldiery of science and humanity.
True enough, cholera managed to plant itself in Italy in 1886, and in
Hamburg in 1892, and the plague was scattered into several German
towns. But it came to Hamburg by water, not by land. It did there
during the summer a dreadful work, but the battle was the Waterloo of
the enemy. Not again while the present order continues will it be
possible for the dreaded epidemic to get the mastery of a great German
city.
It was to be anticipated that Dr. Koch's discovery of the tubercle
bacillus would lead him on to the discovery of a cure for
tuberculosis. Very naturally his thought on this subject was borne in
the direction of inoculation. That method had been used by Pasteur and
by himself in the case of other infectious diseases. Why should it not
be employed in consumption? If the "domestication," so-called, of the
virus of splenic fever and the use of the modified poison as an
antiseptic preventive of the disease was successful, as it had been
proved to be, why should this not be done with the attenuated virus of
consumption?
The last five years of the ninth decade were spent by Dr. Koch in
experimentation on this subject. He found that the tubercular poison
might be treated in the same manner as the poison of other infectious
diseases. He experimented with methods for domesticating the bacillus
of consumption, and reached successful results. On the fourteenth of
November, 1890, he published in a German medical magazine at Berlin a
communication on a possible remedy for tuberculosis. He had prepared a
sort of lymph suitable for hypodermic injection, and with this had
experimented on a form of _external_ tuberculosis called lupus. This
disease is a consumption of the skin and adjacent tissues. It is a
malady almost as dreadful as consumption of the lungs, but is by no
means frequent in its occurrence. It is found only at rare intervals
by the medical practitioner.
Dr. Koch had demonstrated that lupus is a true tuberculosis--that the
germ which produces it is the same bacillus which produces consumption
of the lungs. He accordingly directed his effort to cases of lupus,
treating the patients with hypodermic injections which he had prepared
from the modified form of the tubercular poison. He was successful in
the treatment, and was able to announce, to the joy of the world, that
he had discovered a cure for lupus; and the announcement went so far
as to express a belief in the salutary character of the remedy in the
treatment of consumption of the lungs.
Dr. Koch, however, with the usual caution of the true men of science,
did not announce his tuberculin, or lymph, as a cure for pulmonary
consumption. He did not even declare that it was positively a remedy
for the other forms of tuberculosis, but did announce his cure of
cases of lupus by the agent which he had prepared. The world, after
its manner, leaped at conclusions, and the newspapers of two
continents, in their usual office of disseminating ignorance,
trumpeted Koch's discovery as the end of tubercular consumption.
In January of 1891, Dr. Koch published to the world the composition of
his remedy. It consists of a glycerine extract prepared by the
cultivation of tubercle bacilli. The lymph contains, as it were, the
poisonous matter resulting from the life and activity of the tubercle
bacterium. The fluid is used by hypodermic injection, and when so
administered produces both a general and local reaction. The system is
powerfully affected. A sense of weariness comes on. The breathing is
labored. Nausea ensues; and a fever supervenes which lasts for twelve
or fifteen hours. It is now known that the action of the remedy is not
directly against the tubercle bacilli, but rather against the affected
tissue in which they exist. This tissue is destroyed and thrown off by
the agency of the lymph; being destroyed, it is eliminated and cast
out, carrying with it the bacteria on which the disease depends.
The results which have followed the administration of Koch's lymph for
consumption of the lungs have not met the expectation of the public;
but something has been accomplished. Ignorant enthusiasm has meanwhile
subsided, and scientific men in both Europe and America are pressing
the inquiry in a way which promises in due time the happiest results.