Schneeweiss U
Z Erkr Atmungsorgane. 1983;161(1):46-50.
Robert Koch's epochal discovery of the tubercle bacilli provided the first complete evidence for the specific nature of the causative agents of the most important human infectious disease. It was on this basis that Koch developed his ideas about the doctrine of immunity. The high specificity of "Koch's basic experiment" became the cornerstone of the specific early recognition and prophylaxis of tuberculosis and provided a pattern of specific immune diagnostics in general. Basing on the antitoxin experiments of Behring and Ehrlich against diphtheria and tetanus, Koch presumed humoral immune mechanisms to exist also for tuberculosis. These investigations were abandoned after long-lasting efforts. The concept of Robert Koch and his school about the specific humoral immunity of infectious diseases was dominating immunological research for half a century until the elucidation of the cellular nature of the tuberculin reaction became a general asset of modern immunology. Only thereafter this discipline gave full swing from the immunochemical to the immunobiological approach. Robert Koch's merits as a physician and as an investigator reside in his strictly causal-analytical way of thinking and working which was adopted also in the search for the causes of cancer. In studying the immunological virus-host relationship one arrives from the "whence" of the disease at the "why" of its pathological form. This may be conceived of as a conceptual model for problems concerning the biological evolution and differentiation in modern pathology.
罗伯特·科赫对结核杆菌具有划时代意义的发现，为最重要的人类传染病致病因子的特异性本质提供了首个完整证据。正是在此基础上，科赫形成了他关于免疫学说的观点。“科赫基础实验”的高度特异性成为结核病早期特异性识别和预防的基石，并总体上提供了一种特异性免疫诊断模式。基于贝林和埃利希针对白喉和破伤风的抗毒素实验，科赫推测结核病也存在体液免疫机制。经过长期努力，这些研究被放弃了。罗伯特·科赫及其学派关于传染病特异性体液免疫的概念主导了免疫学研究半个世纪，直到结核菌素反应的细胞本质被阐明成为现代免疫学的一项普遍成果。只有在那之后，这一学科才从免疫化学方法全面转向免疫生物学方法。罗伯特·科赫作为一名医生和研究者的功绩在于他严格的因果分析思维和工作方式，这种方式在寻找癌症病因时也被采用。在研究免疫病毒 - 宿主关系时，人们从疾病的“源头”探寻其病理形式的“原因”。这可以被视为现代病理学中有关生物进化和分化问题的一个概念模型。
