Celebrations in Wolstyn on the occasion of the 180th birthday of Robert Koch

On the occasion of the 180. birthday of Robert Koch, on 11.12.1843 in Clausthal in the Harz, the head of the RKI's Department "Infectious Diseases", Martin Mielke, and RKI President Lars Schaade travelled to Wolsztyn, Poland, for a ceremony. In 1876, Robert Koch identified the cause of anthrax in the Prussian province of Poznan in what was then Wollstein and was thus the first to prove that a microorganism was the cause of an infectious disease. The President of the RKI hands over reproductions of letters that Robert Koch wrote to a colleague in Wollstein to the Mayor of Wolsztyn, Wojtek Lis, for the local Robert Koch Museum.

After transferring to the Imperial Health Office in Berlin, Robert Koch identified the tuberculosis pathogen in 1882, for which Koch was awarded the Nobel Prize in Medicine in 1905. In 1891, Koch became director of the newly founded Royal Prussian Institute for Infectious Diseases, now the Robert Koch Institute. Together with Louis Pasteur, Robert Koch is now regarded as a pioneer of microbiology. In recent years, Robert Koch's research trips and colonial medicine in East Africa, the darkest chapter of his career, have also come into focus. After Koch's death on 27 May 1910, the urn containing his ashes was buried in a specially constructed mausoleum at his institute. Robert Koch's scientific legacy is preserved at the Robert Koch Institute.