Max von Pettenkofer (1818 – 1901) was a highly influential German chemist and pioneer of modern hygiene during the 1860s and 70s. According to this article in the American Journal of Epidemiology, he refused to accept that cholera was a water-borne disease. He contended that cholera was the result of an interaction between the cholera germ and the characteristic of the soil. Unfortunately his theory implied that quarantining patients or filtering water was useless in preventing the spread of cholera, which we now know is a deadly postulate.

Faithful readers of this blog know that John Snow is one of my heroes—the first to propose the idea that it was a water-borne disease. Pettenkofer was one of the authoritative voices that dismissed this theory. Sadly, John Snow died ten years before Robert Koch isolated the cholera bacterium under a microscope—in 1884–and so did not live to see that his theory had been proven to be correct.

But Pettenkofer continued to tout his fallacious theories. The German authorities listened to him, and the result was a catastrophic death toll in a cholera outbreak in Hamburg in 1892—five years after Koch had more or less proven the water-borne theory. To discredit Robert Koch, he was famously said to have drunk a vial of water contaminated with Vibrio cholera. He assured the world that he did not get sick. You wonder what he was thinking–surely by that time he would have had at least some doubts.