His works paved the way for the beginning of modern bacteriology, and inspired Louis Pasteur and Robert Koch.

Klebs was an assistant to Virchow at the Charité in Berlin from 1861 until 1866, when he became a professor of pathology at the University of Bern in Switzerland.

Because of disagreements with the rest of the faculty, the impetuous Klebs resigned from Zürich in 1893 and ran an unsuccessful private business in Karlsruhe and Strassburg in 1894.

[6] Also Klebsormidium, which is a genus of filamentous charophyte green algae comprising 20 species,was also named in his honour in 1972.

In 1878, he successfully inoculated syphilis in monkeys, antedating Élie Metchnikoff and Émile Roux by 25 years.

In 1879, Corrado Tommasi-Crudeli and he claimed that they isolated a bacterium from the waters of Pontine Marshes in Roman Campagna.

[14] An American physician, though, George Miller Sternberg, proved that the bacillus did not cause specific symptoms of malaria in 1881.

[16][17] Klebs also made mistakes in claiming the existence of Microzoon septicum as causative agent of wound infection, and "monadines" as the pathogen for rheumatism.