George Miller Sternberg

George Miller Sternberg (1838 to 1915) was a United States Army physician regarded as the first American bacteriologist, author of the Manual of Bacteriology published in 1892. After surviving typhoid and yellow fever himself, he documented the cause of malaria in 1881, identified the cause of lobar pneumonia in the same year, and confirmed the roles of the tuberculosis and typhoid bacilli in 1886. As the eighteenth Army Surgeon General, from 1893 to 1902, he led commissions on typhoid and yellow fever alongside his subordinate Major Walter Reed, and oversaw the founding of the Army Medical School, now the Walter Reed Army Institute of Research, and of the Army Nurse Corps in 1901. Robert Koch honored him as the Father of American Bacteriology.