Laboratory Disease: Robert Koch’s Medical Bacteriology (review)

In studying the dynamic interplay of laboratory practice and biographical details of Robert Koch’s life such as personal style, creativity, passions, and foibles, historian of medicine Christopher Gradmann pursues a question that historians have little explored. He investigates the internal effects of Koch’s external, public achievements. These achievements are legendary, of course, and include milestones in the development of German bacteriology such as his anthrax life cycle investigations of 1872, identifying the etiological role of the tubercle bacillus in 1882, and formulating criteria for disease causality that came to be known as Koch’s postulates.

The external effects of Koch’s work on medicine and public health are well known and extensively analyzed. But this interior exploration is a new and welcome scholarly path that is thoroughly traveled in Laboratory Disease. The work augments Koch’s public papers and presentations with private sources such as laboratory notebooks and diaries, a highly enriching methodology similar to that used by Gerald Geison in The Private Science of Louis Pasteur (Princeton, New Jersey, Princeton University Press, 1995). Unlike Geison, however, Gradmann did not have complete laboratory logs to inform the story, just a partial sampling of Koch’s notes and diaries. But it is enough for this brilliantly integrated story, which is vigorously researched and fluidly told by an accomplished scholar formerly of the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin and the University of Heidelberg. Now at the University of Oslo, Gradmann works out the impact of exterior events on Koch’s inner life by developing four separate studies of Koch and his work over an approximately forty-year span, from the 1870s to 1910, the year Koch died. In defending the historical value and utility of private notebooks as source material, Gradmann writes: “The fact is . . . that this is simply a genre of texts in which a researcher’s individual style is most clearly revealed” (4).

And what individual style is revealed? How about Koch’s casual approach to theory. Surprising, this, for a man who often appears to hold “Postulates” as a surname. One could be forgiven for assuming Koch to be a grand marshal in the fractious theorizing parades of late nineteenth-century Europe as to the nature of microorganisms, contagion, and control. But in fact, Koch was driven by a focused passion on pragmatic concerns such as improving laboratory technique in the forms of better stains, purer cultures, and more effective animal experiments; of extending and then applying bacteriological knowledge to solve clinical and therapeutic problems. He was not content to merely elaborate etiologies in accordance with theory, publish, and call it a day. As Gradmann remarks, “A comparison of the German bacteriologist with the French microbiologist Louis Pasteur, or with his own students Emil von Behring and Paul Erlich, makes Koch look positively adverse to theory. Theoretical statements of major importance are rare in his writings, and when they appear, they vary considerably depending on the circumstances . . .” (3). Gradmann’s point is clear and important: Koch was a doer not a dreamer.

Koch’s papers also hint at scientific ambition for his experiments. For him, it was not enough that the outcome of inoculation experiments caused symptoms—remember, it is “postulates,” plural. The key for Koch was that they did so uniformly, consistently and predictably, “as if fresh tubercular substances had been inoculated” (3) he recounts. This remark suggests the grand goal and high stakes Koch was after, namely, achieving a level of control over nature—not merely provoking a response as any ordinary apprentice to nature might.

In all, Laboratory Disease is a remarkably insightful, satisfying, and surprising work. The surprise is that we think we know so much more about Koch than we really do. To see Koch as a lab jockey more interested in the power and promise of experimentalism than in aligning the theorem first, explains a lot—that Wild West feeling, for example, of the turn-of-the...