Indian Wars Brigadier General George Miller Sternberg (June 8, 1838 – November 3, 1915) was a U.S. Army physician who is considered the first American bacteriologist, having written Manual of Bacteriology (1892).

[2] As the 18th U.S. Army Surgeon General, from 1893 to 1902, Sternberg led commissions to control typhoid and yellow fever, along with his subordinate Major Walter Reed.

His father was a Lutheran clergyman, was descended from a German family from the Palatinate, which had settled in the Schoharie Valley in the early years of the 18th century.

[4][5][6] On May 28, 1861, he was appointed an Assistant Surgeon in the U.S. Army, and on July 21 of the same year was captured at the First Battle of Bull Run, while serving with General George Sykes' division.

Besides his military duties, Sternberg was also interested in fossils and began collecting leaf imprints from the nearby Dakota Sandstone Formation.

Sternberg also collected vertebrate fossils, including shark teeth, fish remains and mosasaur bones, from the Smoky Hill Chalk and Pierre Shale formations in western Kansas, and sent the specimens back to Washington, D.C., where they were eventually curated in the United States National Museum (Smithsonian Institution).

[7] During two years at Governors Island and three (1872–75) at Fort Barrancas, Florida, Sternberg had frequent contacts with yellow fever patients, and at the latter post, he contracted the disease himself.

He had earlier noted the efficiency of moving inhabitants out of an infested environment and successfully applied that method to the Barrancas garrison.

[7] On December 1, 1875, Sternberg was promoted major, and in April 1879, he was ordered to Washington, D. C., and detailed with the 1880 Havana Yellow Fever Commission.

In the course of this work, he spent three months in Havana closely associated with Dr. Carlos Finlay, the main proponent of the theory of mosquito transmission of yellow fever.

He was the first in the United States to demonstrate the Plasmodium organism as cause of malaria (1885) and to confirm the causitive roles of the bacilli of tuberculosis and typhoid fever (1886).

This work was continued in Washington and in the laboratories of Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore, under the auspices of the American Public Health Association.

[6] During the Hamburg cholera epidemic of 1892 he was detailed for duty with the New York quarantine station as a consultant on disinfection as applied to ships, their personnel, and cargo.

Sternberg's nine-year tenure (1893–1902) as Surgeon General coincided with immense professional progress in the field of bacteriology as well as the occurrence of the Spanish–American War.

Sternberg created the Typhoid Fever Board (1898), consisting of Majors Walter Reed, Victor C. Vaughan, and Edward O. Shakespeare, which established the facts of contact infection and fly carriage of the disease.

[9] Sternberg was retired on account of age on June 8, 1902, and devoted the later years of his life to social welfare activities in Washington, particularly to the sanitary improvement of dwellings and to the care of tuberculous patients.

On Sternberg's monument in Arlington National Cemetery is the inscription: Pioneer American Bacteriologist, distinguished by his studies of the causation and prevention of infectious diseases, by his discovery of the microorganism causing pneumonia, and scientific investigations of yellow fever, which paved the way for the experimental demonstration of the mode of transmission of this pestilence.

D.[11]Along with Pasteur and Koch, Sternberg is credited with first bringing the fundamental principles and techniques of the new science of bacteriology within the reach of the average physician.