“No matter who he is--it is a great discovery, so exact, so simple. It is astounding! This Koch is not a professor, even.... He hasn’t even been taught how to do research! He’s done it all by himself, complete--there is nothing more to do!” “But what is this discovery, Herr Professor?” “Go, I tell you, every one of you, and see for yourselves. It is the most marvelous discovery in the realm of microbes ... he will make us all ashamed of ourselves.... Go----” But by this time, all of them, including Paul Ehrlich, had disappeared through the door. Seven years before, Pasteur had foretold: “It is within the power of man to make parasitic maladies disappear from the face of the earth....” And when he said these words the wisest doctors in the world put their fingers to their heads, thinking: “The poor fellow is cracked!” But this night Robert Koch had shown the world the first step toward the fulfillment of Pasteur’s seemingly insane vision: “Tissues from animals dead of anthrax, whether they are fresh, or putrid, or dried, or a year old, can only produce anthrax when they contain bacilli or the spores of bacilli. Before this fact all doubt must be laid aside that these bacilli are the cause of anthrax,” he told them finally, as if his experiments had not convinced them already. And he ended by telling his amazed audience how to fight this terrible disease--how his experiments showed a way to stamp it out in the end: “All animals that die of anthrax must be destroyed at once after they die--or if they can not be burned, they should be buried deep in the ground, where the earth is so cold that the bacilli cannot turn into the tough, long-lived spores....” So it was that in these three days at Breslau this Koch put a sword Excalibur into the hands of men, with which to begin the fight against their enemies the microbes, their fight against lurking death; so it was that he began to change the whole business of doctors from a foolish hocus-pocus with pills and leeches into an intelligent fight where science instead of superstition was the weapon. Koch fell among friends--among honest generous men--at Breslau. Cohn and Cohnheim, instead of trying to steal his stuff (there are no fewer shady fellows in science than in any other human activity), these two professors immediately set up a great whooping for Koch, an applause that echoed over Europe and made Pasteur a bit uneasy for his job as Dean of the Microbe Hunters. These two friends began to bombard the authorities of the Imperial Health Office at Berlin about this unknown that Germany ought to be proud of--they did their best to give Koch a chance to do nothing but chase the microbes of disease, to get away from that dull practice of his.