KOCH ROBERT (1843-1910)

Lot 217
Go to lot
Estimation :
2000 - 3000 EUR
Result with fees
Result : 3 250EUR
KOCH ROBERT (1843-1910)
L.A.S. "R. Koch", Berlin 30 December 1887, to a colleague; 4 pages in-8 (slight slit); in German. Nice scientific letter about joint research on hematozoans. He regrets not meeting his colleague at a conference in Berlin, as he would have liked to have had an oral discussion with him about hematozoan research, as the exchange is difficult by letter. He has no doubt about what his colleague has observed in his blood. But he does not share his interpretation of these observations. Koch remembers observing similar things, even if not quite identical, in different situations and even in blood samples that were not necessarily healthy; he thought he was dealing with decomposition products or a modification of the normal components of blood ("Ich erinnere mich ähnliche, wenn nicht dieselben Dinge unter den verschiedensten Verhältnissen, auch im unzweifelhaft gesunden Blute gesehen zu haben und ich habe deswegen geglaubt, es mit Zerfallsprodukten und Modifi cationen der normalen Bestandtheile des Blutes zu thun zu haben"). Nor does it take into account the entities described by Messrs Schulze, Hoff mann and more recently Fokker (the Dutch physicist Abraham Pieter Fokker), as they are all normally present in the blood. Koch regrets the absence of evidence in his colleague's research that these characteristic changes are limited to blood contaminated with infectious diseases and that, apart from the few diseases in the group in question, these observations are particularly specific to exanthematic diseases. Other disparities between the different diseases are therefore likely to remain. Koch also finds that the evidence of the autonomy of hematozoans, i. e. the evidence that they are independent living cells, is still insufficient ("Auch die Beweise für die Selbststdndigkeit der Hämatozoen, d. h. dafür, daß sie wirkliche selbständige lebende Wesen sind, scheinen mir noch keineswegs ausreichend")...
My orders
Sale information
Sales conditions
Return to catalogue