Theobald Smith

Smith was a pioneer epidemiologist, bacteriologist, and pathologist who made many contributions to medical science that were of far-reaching importance. He is best known for his work on Texas cattle fever, in which he and his colleagues discovered the protozoan agent and its means of transmission by ticks. This was the ¿ rst time that an arthropod had been de¿ nitively linked with the transmission of an infectious disease. Theobald Smith was born in 1859. He was the son of a German immigrant, who kept a small tailoring shop in Albany, New York. At age 18, Smith earned a tuition-free scholarship to Cornell University. He graduated from Cor-nell in 1881 with a Bachelor of Philosophy degree, and he received his MD at Albany Medical College in 1883. Realizing that his 2 years of study had not prepared him for the practice of medicine, Smith returned to Cornell for graduate study. Smith's mentor at Cornell, Professor Simon Gage, helped him secure his ¿ rst job at the newly formed Bureau of Animal Industry (BAI) in Washington, DC. Smith also established a department of bacteriology at Columbian University (now George Washington University), where he taught from 1886 to 1895. This was the ¿ rst department of bacteriology at a medical school in the United States. When he went to Washington, Smith knew very little bacteriology. He had not been able go to Europe to study with men like Pasteur, Koch, or Virchow. Because he could read and speak German almost as well as English and he could read French easily, he was able to study the papers of these masters and teach himself. Within a year of his arrival in Washington, Smith introduced Koch's methods. At this time, he also began his lifelong work on tuberculosis. At a later time, he successfully challenged Koch's concept that human and bovine tuberculosis were caused by the same organism. Smith's work at BAI was extremely productive. BAI was created within the Department of Agriculture in 1884, when efforts by the states to stem the rising tide of animal diseases proved inadequate. The major problems were hog cholera, bovine pleuropneumonia, Texas cattle fever, turkey blackhead, and bovine tuberculosis. During his ¿ rst 2 years at BAI, Smith discovered a new species of bacteria (Salmonella enterica, formerly called Salmonella choler-aesuis), which he thought was the cause of hog cholera. It was later shown that hog cholera was …