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In those astounding and exciting years between 1860 and 1870, when Pasteur was saving vinegar industries and astonishing emperors and finding out what ailed sick silkworms, a small, serious, and nearsighted German was learning to be a doctor at the University of Gottingen. His name was Robert Koch. He was a good student, but while he hacked at cadavers he dreamed of going tiger-hunting in the jungle. Conscientiously he memorized the names of several hundred bones and muscles, but the fancied moan of the whistles of steamers bound for the East chased this Greek and Latin jargon out of his head.

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 steamerwhistles 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,