Koch–Pasteur rivalry
[1] Pasteur had already discovered molecular chirality, investigated fermentation, refuted spontaneous generation, inspired Lister's introduction of antisepsis to surgery, introduced pasteurization to France's wine industry, answered the silkworm diseases blighting France's silkworm industry, attenuated a Pasteurella species of bacteria to develop vaccine to chicken cholera (1879), and introduced anthrax vaccine (1881).
Although Koch had briefly and, thereafter, his bacteriological followers regarded a bacterial species' properties as unalterable,[2] Pasteur's modification of virulence to develop vaccine demonstrated this doctrine's falsity.
[1] The "German Problem", as Germany increasingly gained scientific, technological, and industrial dominance, fed tensions among European nations.
Influenced by Henle and by Cohn, Koch developed a pure culture of the bacteria described by Davaine, traced its spore stage, inoculated it into animals, and showed it caused anthrax.
In 1879, Henri Toussaint identified a bacterial species involved in chicken cholera and named the genus in honor of Pasteur, Pasteurella.
Pasteur applied the discovery to develop chicken cholera vaccine, introduced in a public experiment, an empirical challenge to the stance of Koch's bacteriologists that bacterial traits were unalterable.
[1] From 1878 to 1880, when publishing on anthrax, Pasteur referred to the bacteria by the name given it by Frenchman Davaine, but in one footnote called it "Bacillus anthracis of the Germans".
On 6 July 1885, the vaccine was tested on 9-year old Joseph Meister who had been bitten by a rabid dog but failed to develop rabies, and Pasteur was called a hero.
[21] Named the medical school's first dean in 1883,[21] Welch promptly traveled for training in Koch's bacteriology, and returned to America eager to transform medicine with the "secrets of nature".
[26] While MDs ascended in American public health, it was thought that "the greatest contribution of all, the foundation upon which modern sanitary science is built, was made by Pasteur.
[29][30] Welch exhibited gratuitous anti-German bias despite the debt of his own career, thus American medicine, to Germany,[31] especially to Koch's bacteriology.
[32] In 1901 at the London Congress on Tuberculosis, Koch stated on theoretical grounds that M bovis, which infects cows, was not transmissible to humans.
[33] British attendees disagreed, and later Theobald Smith and the English Royal Commission empirically established that M bovis was transmissible and could result in human disease.
[26] In 1921 Albert Calmette and Camille Guérin of Pasteur Institute introduced tuberculosis vaccine, whose virulence of strains varied in the late 1920s.
[37] Pasteur had highlighted a new threat—microorganisms benign to humans passing among and multiplying in nonhuman animals while gaining new virulence for humans—that is thought to loom and to have approximately materialized with AIDS.
[12] Twentieth-century philosophy, inspired by revolutions in physics, establishment of molecular biology, and advances in epidemiology, revealed that any claim of a single causal factor both necessary (required) and sufficient (complete), the cause, is untenable.
