Max von Pettenkofer

Max von Pettenkofer Award

In August 1892, a cholera outbreak struck Hamburg. In just a few months, 17 000 cases of the illness were recorded resulting in 8600 deaths within a population of about 640 000 (Evans, 1987). At its peak intensity, only a few weeks after the onset, a thousand illnesses and five hundred deaths were reported daily in the city. Intense but short-lived cholera outbreaks had struck Hamburg and other...

Viral Hepatitis. Second International Max von Pettenkofer Symposium

In October 1982, virologists, molecular biologists, epidemiologists, diagnosticians, oncologists, and pathologists from around the world gathered in Munich, West Germany, for the Second International Max von Pettenkofer Symposium on Viral Hepatitis. The purpose of this meeting was to focus on the common interests of clinicians and laboratory investigators in the ever-burgeoning discipline of vi...

Pettenkofer revisited: the life and contributions of Max von Pettenkofer (1818-1901).

If the name of Max von Pettenkofer is remembered at all in America it is probably because he drank live cholera vibrio in apparent defiance of the germ theory and did not fall ill. Yet this act was not a hasty, emotional one but one of strong conviction that more than just the organism is needed to cause disease. It was a beginning of the epidemiologic concept of multiple causation. Pettenkofer...

A Reply to an Address of Prof. Max Von Pettenkofer of Munich

Epidemiologic interactions, complexity, and the lonesome death of Max von Pettenkofer.

In the mid-19th century, the German hygienist Max von Pettenkofer viewed cholera as resulting from the interaction between a postulated cholera germ and the characteristics of soils. In order to cause cholera, the cholera germ had to become a cholera miasma, but this transformation required prolonged contact of the germ with dry and porous soils when groundwater levels were low. This hypothetic...