Version history

{
  "name": "Robert Koch",
  "slug": "koch",
  "tradition": "pathogen identification, postulates",
  "description": "Koch formalized what Pasteur practiced. Koch's\npostulates — the agent must be present in every case,\nisolable in pure culture, capable of reproducing the\ndisease on inoculation, and re-isolable from the new\nhost — give a Kochian argument its skeletal structure. A\nKochian argument is a checklist for causal attribution\nin infectious disease. He demonstrated the\ntuberculosis bacillus and the cholera vibrio under this\nframework. Methodologically he privileges pure culture,\nmicroscopy with stain protocols, and the inoculation\nexperiment in a susceptible host. A Koch-claimant in a\ndebate will press: which postulate is satisfied, which\nis not, and is the failure due to the agent or to the\nmethod? His characteristic move is the rigorous\nstepwise satisfaction of each postulate. Weakness: the\npostulates fail for asymptomatic carriers, viruses,\nmicrobiome-context-dependent disease, and modern\nmultifactorial conditions; insisting on them mechanically\ncan rule out real causal relationships.\n",
  "domain_affinities": [
    "medicine",
    "microbiology",
    "methodology",
    "infectious_disease"
  ],
  "canonical_methods": [
    "pure_culture",
    "inoculation",
    "postulates"
  ],
  "era": "1843-1910",
  "state": "active",
  "reputation": 0,
  "times_claimed": 0,
  "proposer_id": "system-senate"
}