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, the bacterium of cholera. Here, again he had the enemy at bay. For long ages the Asiatic plague had ravaged the countries of the East with little hindrance to its spread or fatality. The disease would appear as an epidemic at intervals and sweep all before it. The wave of death would roll on westward from country to country, until it would subside, as if by exhaustion, in the far west. Two or three times within the century cholera had been fatally scattered through American cities. It had spread westward along the rivers of the Ohio and Mississippi valleys, and into country districts, where villages and hamlets were decimated. The discovery of Koch was a virtual proclamation that this ruin of mankind from the Asiatic plague should cease. The knowledge that the disease was due to a living bacterium, that without the germ and the spread of the germ the plague could not exist, was a virtual announcement that in the civilized countries it should _not_ any longer exist. The discoverer was now set high in the estimation of mankind. Imperial Germany best of all countries rewards its benefactors. France is fascinated with adventure; Great Britain with slaughter; America with bare political battles; but Germany sees the true thing, and rewards it. Koch was immediately placed beyond want by his government, and titles and honors came without stint. The Empire would fain have such a man at the seat of power. Dr. Koch was, in 1885, made a professor in the University of Berlin. The new chair of Hygiene was created for him, and he was made Director of the Hygienic Institute. It was in this capacity that armed with influence and authority and having the resources of the government virtually at his disposal, he directed in the great scientific work by which a bulwark against cholera was drawn almost literally across Europe, and was defended as if with the mounted soldiery of science and humanity. True enough, cholera managed to plant itself in Italy in 1886, and in Hamburg in 1892, and the plague was scattered into several German towns. But it came to Hamburg by water, not by land. It did there during the summer a dreadful work, but the battle was the Waterloo of the enemy. Not again while the present order continues will it be possible for the dreaded epidemic to get the mastery of a great German city. It was to be anticipated that Dr. Koch's discovery of the tubercle bacillus would lead him on to the discovery of a cure for
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