Birth of Robert Koch

Robert Koch was born on 11 December 1843 in Clausthal. A German physician, Koch is regarded as one of the founders of modern bacteriology. Working first as a country doctor, he identified the bacterium that causes anthrax in 1876, and in 1882 he discovered the tubercle bacillus, the cause of tuberculosis, followed by the cholera bacterium in 1883. He developed techniques for growing pure cultures and staining bacteria, and formulated criteria, known as Koch's postulates, for establishing that a particular microbe causes a disease. He led an institute for infectious diseases in Berlin and received the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1905. His promotion of tuberculin as a cure was not successful.

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