Robert Koch — "I believe that every disease has a specific cause, and that cause can be identif…"
I believe that every disease has a specific cause, and that cause can be identified.
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More from Robert Koch
"A disease is not an entity, but a process."
"The microscope is our most important tool in the fight against disease."
"The experimental method is the foundation of all scientific progress."
"The microbes are always there; it is the soil that changes."
"The ultimate goal of all research must be the prevention of disease."
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Understanding this quote
What it means
Diseases aren't random misfortunes — they have specific, findable causes. Koch is asserting that illness follows natural laws: there is always a definite agent responsible, and systematic investigation can uncover it. This rejects vague explanations like 'bad air' or divine punishment, declaring instead that medicine could become a true science — where identifying the cause made prevention and cure genuinely possible.
Relevance to Robert Koch
Koch lived this belief literally. He isolated the bacterial agents behind anthrax (1876), tuberculosis (1882), and cholera (1883), transforming each from mysterious killer into knowable enemy. He codified the principle as Koch's Postulates — a four-step framework proving which microbe causes which disease — converting personal conviction into scientific method. His 1905 Nobel Prize for tuberculosis research confirmed that this lifelong certainty was both correct and world-changing.
The era
Koch worked in the 1870s–1900s when miasma theory — disease arising from 'bad air' and decay — still competed with Pasteur's emerging germ theory. Tuberculosis killed roughly one in seven Europeans; cholera swept cities in repeated pandemics. Industrialization crowded workers into unsanitary urban slums with no causal framework for illness. Claiming every disease had an identifiable specific cause was radical optimism in an era that accepted epidemic death as inevitable fate.
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