with unselfish, loving consideration for everyone who came into his
sphere. These qualities helped him, more than anyone else, convince the
world that germs were real. Semmelweis, devoid of charm, became an
annoyance, and lost to madness, died in cruel irony the day after Lister’s
first antiseptic operation. Francis Darwin, son of Charles Darwin,
concluded, “In science the credit goes to the man who convinces the
world, not to the man to whom the idea first occurs.”^29
In only a few years, Lister’s antiseptic method would be examined on a
continental scale. The Franco-Prussian War lasted less than a year (July
1870 to May 1871), but provided a unique laboratory for Lister’s
techniques. The Germans were among the first to adopt Listerism,
establishing field hospitals attended by physicians armed with carbolic
acid. The Franco-Prussian War was the first war in history fought with
accurate guns and cannons—knifepoint and bayonet wounds were rare—
with the end result that wounded soldiers “bore the unique scars of long-
range rifle shots: diffuse, open wounds with splintered bone fragments and
bits of clothing mixed in with the damaged flesh.”^30 The injured German
soldiers were doused, scrubbed, dabbed, and swabbed with the carbolic
poultice, with the end result that, for the first time in warfare history,
fewer men died from infections from their wounds than from the trauma
itself. Alternatively, the French, who clung to the ancient and unscientific
method of globbing on greasy salves to open wounds, beheld a 70 percent
mortality rate from infection following amputation.^31 The theater of war
had staged its greatest laboratory experiment in Listerism, and only the
most obstinate would cling to their outdated black magic.
Of the thousands of medical personnel in the Prussian army, there were
two remarkable physicians whose immediate impact was negligible, but
whose eventual contributions were enormous. One was Edwin Krebs, a
protégé of Rudolf Virchow, and the other was Robert Koch, a young
German man from a small village. Krebs, away from the front lines of the
Franco-Prussian War and emulating his esteemed professor, decided to
sample some tissue from the wounds of deceased soldiers. Utilizing his
microscope, Krebs observed a multitude of rod-shaped and spherical
bodies among the infected tissues. Similar to Pasteur’s observations of
spoiled milk and beet-juice alcohol, Krebs made a groundbreaking
hypothesis: the odd-appearing bodies were germs that not only were