Georg Theodor August Gaffky

Georg Theodor August Gaffky (1850 to 1918) was a German bacteriologist born in Hanover. He studied medicine at the Friedrich Wilhelm University in Berlin, finishing in 1873 after an interruption for the Franco-Prussian War, and wrote a dissertation that proposed a relationship between lead poisoning and kidney disease. After working as an assistant at the Berlin Charite hospital and serving as an army surgeon, he became an assistant to Robert Koch, and under Koch's leadership he and others developed the bacteriological protocols that advanced the identification of the causes of infectious diseases. Gaffky spent years improving culture methods for the typhoid bacillus that Karl Joseph Eberth had described, and in 1884 he reported isolating it in 26 of 28 typhoid cases. He later joined the expedition to Egypt on which Koch worked out how cholera is transmitted, advised the government during the 1892 Hamburg cholera outbreak, led an investigation of the 1897 plague outbreak in India, and directed the Berlin Institute for Infectious Diseases from 1904 to 1913.