Koch wanted to be an explorer; or to be a military surgeon and win Iron Crosses; or to be ship’s doctor and voyage to impossible places. But alas, when he graduated from the medical college in 1866 he became an interne in a not very interesting insane asylum in Hamburg. Here, busy with raving maniacs and helpless idiots, the echoes of Pasteur’s prophecies that there were such things as terrible man-killing microbes hardly reached Koch’s ears. He was still listening for steamer-whistles and in the evenings he took walks down by the wharves with Emmy Fraatz; he begged her to marry him; he held out the bait of romantic trips around the world to her. Emmy told Robert that she would marry him, but on condition that he forget this nonsense about an adventurous life, provided that he would settle down to be a practicing doctor, a good useful citizen, in Germany. Koch listened to Emmy--for a moment the allure of fifty years of bliss with her chased away his dreams of elephants and Patagonia--and he settled down to practice medicine; he began what was to him a totally uninteresting practice of medicine in a succession of unromantic Prussian villages. Just now, while Koch wrote prescriptions and rode horseback through the mud and waited up nights for Prussian farmer women to have their babies, Lister in Scotland was beginning to save the lives of women in childbirth--by keeping microbes away from them. The professors and the students of the medical colleges of Europe were beginning to be excited and to quarrel about Pasteur’s theory of malignant microbes, here and there men were trying crude experiments, but Koch was almost as completely cut off from this world of science as old Leeuwenhoek had been, two hundred years before, when he first fumbled at grinding glass into lenses in Delft in Holland. It looked as if his fate was to be the consoling of sick people and the beneficent and praiseworthy attempt to save the lives of dying people--mostly, of course, he did not save them--and his wife Emmy was quite satisfied with this and was proud when Koch earned five dollars and forty-five cents on especially busy days. But Robert Koch was restless. He trekked from one deadly village to another still more uninteresting, until at last he came to Wollstein, in East Prussia, and here, on his twenty-eighth birthday, Mrs. Koch bought him a microscope to play with. You can hear the good woman say: “Maybe that will take Robert’s mind off what he calls his stupid practice ... perhaps this will satisfy him a little ... he’s always looking at everything with his old magnifying glass....”