Excerpt from The Remedy by Thomas Goetz, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

This familiar presence of consumption made it impossible for most medical men to believe it was infectious at all. This disease was thought to stem from bad climate, and sloth. It was believed to be a form of cancer, perhaps, and then largely hereditary, brought on by one's family background. That was the obvious explanation. Until, that is, Koch stepped into that library.

Koch had girded himself for at least a year of contention before his research would be accepted. Given the orthodoxy lined up against the idea that germs could cause disease, he expected to wage his argument in every possible arena. Instead, it was as if the world had been waiting expectantly to hear him.

Rarely had medicine ever experienced, wrote the British Medical Journal, "so sudden and complete casting aside of tradition." A month after the Berlin demonstration, London's Medical Gazette praised Koch's work. "To those old-standing questions which have hitherto baffled the penetration of the wisest of our profession, Dr. Koch has returned an answer that is singularly free from ambiguity. Tuberculosis … is a parasitic disease of the internal organs; the parasite is a bacillus." (The Gazette editors were particularly pleased that Koch's work might create less tolerance for public spitting.)


Once word of Koch's breakthrough crossed the Atlantic, The New York Times compared Koch to Darwin, and instantly demanding more from Koch's discovery. "The popular interest in the little parasite Dr. Koch has introduced to the world will deepen in proportion as medical science demonstrates its power to annihilate him or rob him of his fatal power." In other words, discovery was one thing. But a cure—a remedy—was what the world really wanted.

Koch, more than anybody, was aware of the power of a cure. He had watched jealously as his great rival, Louis Pasteur, uncorked a treatment for rabies, the first great weapon against the disease since Jenner's smallpox vaccination. Koch wanted desperately to be recognized as their peer, their equal, and their better. His discovery of the tuberculosis bacteria had given him a taste of fame, and made him thirsty for more. Koch returned to his laboratory determined to answer the public's call. Tuberculosis was all his, and the greater glory of a cure, of a remedy, was his destiny.

Reprinted from The Remedy: Robert Koch, Arthur Conan Doyle, and the Quest to Cure Tuberculosis by arrangement with Gotham Books, a member of Penguin Group (USA) LLC, A Penguin Random House Company. Copyright Thomas Goetz, 2014.