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Robert Koch's beginnings
Robert Koch was born Heinrich Hermann Robert Koch on Decenber 11, 1843 in Clausthal, Prussia, a German state. He came from a poor mining family and from an early age demonstrated his brilliance. He taught himself to read when he was 5 years old. -
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Avril Brown
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Education
Koch graduate primary school in 1862 and attended the University of Gottingen and studied medicine under Friederich Gustav Jakob Henle, the Professor of Anatomy. He then graduated in 1866. -
Military service & founding bacteriology
After graduating university, Koch enlisted to serve in the Franco-Prussian War in 1870. After the war, he was apointed the district medical officer in Wollstein. -
Research
After he was appointed district medical officer in Wollstein in 1872, he began researching bacteria with a microscope his wife gave to him. He also started to experiment with microbes, a microorganism, in a labratory he built for himself. This is when he started doing his investigation on anthrax, a disease that affects many herds on animals in barnyards. -
Publishing his results
After conducting his research, Koch eventually came to the conclusion that anthrax germs lived long after the infected animal had died, and that in turn can infect other animals as well. -
Other ventures
After publishing his results about anthrax and barnyard animals. Robert Koch moved on to research germs that only affected humans. He then identified the germs that caused blood poisoning and septicaemia, which is a deadly disease that is characterized by a whole-body inflamation. -
A new job at the Imperial Office
After devising a method of discovering germs that infect humans, Koch was awarded a job at the Imperial Office in 1880. While working here, he revised his technique of growing samples of germs with a mix of potatoes and gelatin. He did this because it was now a stable enough sample to be studied. -
Tuberculosis (TB) research
Koch and his team of researchers wanted to work on one of the leading causes of death in the 19th century, tuberculosis. Using his dyeing technique, In May of 1882, he announced that he and his team have found the germ. Also in 1881 he urged the use of heat in sterilization of instruments. -
Research in Egypt
In 1883, Robert Koch worked with a French team in Alexandria, Egypt to research cholera, an infection of the small intestine.
Even though he managed to find the bacterium that cause cholera, he was never able to prove it in his experiments. -
Later life travels
After becoming the Professor of Hygiene at the University of Berlin and becoming Honorary Profesor of the medical faculty and director of the Prussian Institute of Infectious Diseases, Koch traveled around the world, studying diseases of South America, India, and Java, an island of Indonesia. -
Winner of the Nobel Prize
Robert Koch was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1905 for his work on the Koch"s postulates, a set of 4 rules to create a relationship between causative microbe and disease. -
Death
Robert Koch dies of a heart attack at age 66, in Baden-Baden, Grand Duchy Baden.
