Overview

Robert Koch (December 11, 1843 - May 27, 1910) was a German physician. He became famous for the discovery of the anthrax bacillus (1877), the tuberculosis bacillus (1882) and the cholera vibrio (1883) and for his development of Koch's postulates that define causation.

Koch's postulates are four criteria designed to establish a causal relationship between a causative microbe and a disease. The postulates were formulated by Robert Koch and Friedrich Loeffler in 1884 and refined and published by Koch in 1890. Koch applied the postulates to establish the etiology of anthrax and tuberculosis, but they have been generalized to other diseases.

Koch's postulates are:

• The organism must be found in all animals suffering from the disease, but not in healthy animals.
• The organism must be isolated from a diseased animal and grown in pure culture.
• The cultured organism should cause disease when introduced into a healthy animal.
• The organism must be reisolated from the experimentally infected animal.

References

• Robert Koch - wikipedia