Heart and blood

The Discovery of Cholera Bacterium

In 1883 Koch went to Egypt to study cholera. At that time a wide-spread epidemic of cholera was in Egypt.

Nobody knew the origin of this disease, there were not any protective measures against it.
The disease spread very rapidly from one place to another and thousands of healthy people died. But sometimes some people who were a constant contact with the diseased person did not catch cholera.
As soon as Koch came to Alexandria he and his two assistants Gaffcky and Fisher began their investigations. In the blood, kidneys, spleen, liver and lungs of the people who died of cholera Koch found many microorganisms but all of them were not the agents of cholera. But in the walls of the intestines and stools Koch always found a microorganism which looked like a comma. Many times Koch tried to grow this bacterium on gelatin but it did not grow. Many times Koch inoculated this bacterium to the experimental animals, but none became ill with cholera. As the epidemic of cholera became less in Egypt, Koch went to India to continue his investigations there. In Calcutta Koch often walked along its muddy streets, where the poor lived. Once Koch saw some muddy water on the ground near a small house.
Koch looked into that water and he thought he saw there those “commas”. He took some of this water, analyzed it under the microscope many times and found in it the same bacteria which he had so many times revealed in the people ill with cholera.

MILK VITAMINS

In 1881, Russian surgeon Nikolai Lunin studied the effects of scurvy while at the University of Tartu in present-day Estonia. He fed mice an artificial mixture of all the separate constituents of milk known at that time, namely the proteins, fats, carbohydrates, and salts. The mice that received only the individual constituents died, while the mice fed by milk itself developed normally. He made a conclusion that "a natural food such as milk must therefore contain, besides these known principal ingredients, small quantities of unknown substances essential to life." However, his conclusions were rejected by other researchers when they were unable to reproduce his results. One difference was that he had used table sugar (sucrose), while other researchers had used milk sugar (lactose) that still contained small amounts of vitamin B. In large doses, some vitamins have documented side effects that tend to be more severe with a larger dosage. The likelihood of consuming too much of any vitamin from food is remote, but overdosing from vitamin supplementation does occur. At high enough dosages some vitamins cause side effects such as nausea, diarrhea, and vomiting.