Abstract
NESTOR of German hygiene, August Anton Hieronymus Gärtner, whose name is familiar to every medical student in Gärtner‘s Bacillus (Salmonella enteritidis), was born on April 18, 1848, at Ochtrub, Westphalia. He served in the Franco-Prussian War of 1870–71, and in 1884 became assistant to Robert Koch at the Kaiserliche Gesundheitsamt, Berlin. Two years later he was appointed to the chair of hygiene at the University of Jena, which he held until his retirement in 1914. As a teacher he was immensely popular, his genial personality endearing him to students and colleagues alike. It was in 1888, during an outbreak of meat poisoning in Frankenhausen on the Kyffhauser, that he succeeded in growing the bacillus ever since known by his name. To the literature of hygiene he contributed his classic "Die Hygiene des Trinkwassers (1897), "Die Hygiene des Wassers" (1915), and, in co-operation with Ferdinand Tiemann, "Handbuch der Untersuchung und Beur-teilung des Wassers" (1889–95). His "Leitfadender Hygiene" was first published in 1892 ; a telith edition was issued in 1923, and a French translation in 1895. In the First World War Gärtner served as ‘Kriegssanitätsinspekteur' of prisoner-of-war camps. Preserving excellent health into advanced age, he died at Jena on December 21, 1934, in his eighty -seventh year. His autobiography appeared in Centralblatt fur Bakteriologie, 107, 1, ii (1928).
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August Gärtner (1848–1934). Nature 161, 593 (1948). https://doi.org/10.1038/161593a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/161593a0