Robert Koch: pioneer of bacteriology and Nobel prize winner

Abstract

As a schoolboy I avidly read Paul de Kruif's (1926) Microbe Hunters. Robert Koch became my hero and I determined to become a doctor and to train as a bacteriologist. (Incidentally, my great disappointment was to find how boring the subject was, as taught at Oxford in those days. I rapidly changed my mind and decided to become a surgeon!) My school-boy role model died 100 years ago, in 1910.