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of man, these men were brave, but there was careless heroism too among some of the ancient doctors and old-fogey sanitarians who thought that all this new stuff about microbes was claptrap and nonsense. Old Professor Pettenkofer of Munich was the leader of the skeptics who were not convinced by Koch's clear experiments, and when Koch came back from India with those comma bacilli that he was sure were the authors of cholera Pettenkofer wrote him something like this: "Send me some of your so-called cholera germs, and I'll show you how harmless they are!"

Koch sent him on a tube that swarmed with wee virulent comma microbes. And so Pettenkofer—to the great alarm of all good microbe hunters—swallowed the entire contents of the tube. There were enough billions of wiggling comma germs in this tube to infect a regiment. Then he growled his scorn through his magnificent beard, and said: "Now let us see if I get cholera!" Mysteriously, nothing happened, and the failure of the mad Pettenkofer to come down with cholera remains to this day an enigma, without even the beginning of an explanation.

Pettenkofer, who was foolhardy enough to try such a possibly suicidal experiment, was also sufficiently cocksure to believe that his drinking of the cholera soup had settled the question in his favor. "Germs are of no account in cholera!" shouted the old doctor. "The important thing is the disposition (whatever that means) of the individual!"

"There can be no cholera without the comma bacillus!" said Koch in reply.

"But I have just swallowed millions of your alleged fatal bacilli, and have not even had a cramp in my stomach!" came back Pettenkofer in rebuttal.

As it is so often the case, alas, in violent scientific controversies, both sides were partly right and partly wrong. Every event of the past forty years has shown that Koch was right when he said that people can never have cholera without swallowing his comma bacillus. And the years that have gone