Baden Baden, May 28.—Professor Robert Koch, the famous bacteriologist, died here yesterday afternoon from a disease of the heart. He was born at Klausthal, Hanover, Dec. 11, 1843.

The name of Dr. Robert Koch is one of the most illustrious in that comparatively small group of the world’s great medical specialists. He was one of the very few men who have demonstrated entirely new principles and developed them to practical results.

Dr. Koch’s investigation of anthrax, to which Pasteur had devoted a great deal of attention, first brought him into general recognition as an authority. A visitation of cholera at Hamburg afforded him scope for experiments in that direction, and to Koch undoubtedly belongs the distinction of specifying and demonstrating the cholera bacillus. He was placed at the head of the cholera commission, and subsequently visited Egypt and India, when those countries were scourged by a cholera epidemic, his services being recognized by various decorations of honor and by a substantial honorarium of 100,000 marks ($20,000).

In the course of his cholera investigations he exemplified the fact that the bacillus, or active organism of the disease, seldom enters deeper than the living membrane of the intestines. His discoveries in demonstrating separately and specifying the bacillus or micro-organism of disease, have also contributed most valuable knowledge of the cause of typhoid fever and erysipelas.

In the popular mind he was perhaps best known as the discoverer of a supposed cure for consumption, a remedy which failed to fulfil the[Pg 185] hopes of an over-expectant public. Yet the tremendous strides made in recent years toward the stamping out of that supposedly incurable disease are due, more than to any other one man, to the great German experimenter. Medical men today freely attribute the striking decrease in the death rate from tuberculosis to Koch’s discovery in 1882 that the disease is infectious. To this achievement he added important studies of malaria, cholera, bubonic plague, rinderpest, cattle plague, splenic fever and wound poison.

Dr. Koch received a medical education at Göttingen. After his graduation, in 1866, he became assistant surgeon in the Hamburg General Hospital. Later he took up private practice at Langenhagen, Hanover; at Rakwitz, Posen; and at Wollstein, Posen. By 1872 he had already a standing in his profession which won him an appointment to the Imperial Board of Health. Ten years later he succeeded in isolating the tubercle bacillus, and his standing as an expert was secure.

Honors followed fast. He was made privy councillor in 1883, and became director of the Cholera Commission to India and Egypt. In 1884 he discovered the cholera spirillum, regarded as the positive test of Asiatic cholera, and for this signal service he received by legislative act a gift of $20,000. The following year he became a professor in the University of Berlin, director of the newly established Hygienic Institute of Berlin, and also director of the Prussian Board of Health.

But so far the winner of scientific honors had escaped the popular notice. It was in November, 1890, that word was suddenly flashed around the world that a German scientist had discovered an infallible remedy for tuberculosis. “Koch’s consumption[Pg 186] cure” became a talismanic phrase of hope to millions. Consumptives rushed to Berlin from every corner of the earth. Men in the last stages of the disease died in railway carriages on their way to the great physician. No one regretted this tragic manifestation more than Dr. Koch. He had known that his experiments were incomplete and that he was not yet ready to put his tuberculin to practical use. He sought to keep it from the public, but sensationalists garbled his modest report, and the mischief was wrought.

Nevertheless, the student continued his work undaunted. The Robert Koch Institute for the investigation of tuberculosis was founded in Berlin. Andrew Carnegie contributed $125,000 to its work. From it has proceeded the most valuable backing of the world-wide war on the white plague.

Dr. Koch’s latest work was the investigation in South Africa of sleeping sickness, in recognition of which Emperor William conferred on him the title of Excellency. From August, 1906, to October, 1907, the doctor and his assistants carried on these investigations on the Sesse Islands, in the Victoria Nyanza. The work was not without its dangers, as the disease manifested itself there in its most virulent form. Natives were dying on all sides. He discovered the origin of the disease in the tsetse fly. To destroy this fly and thus end the scourge he recommended the annihilation of the crocodile, on whose blood the fly feeds.

On one point Dr. Koch differed radically from most other authorities on tuberculosis. He maintained that tuberculosis in cattle was not transferable to man. This position he held to most vigorously at the Tuberculosis Congress in London, in 1901. In 1908, however, when he came to this country to attend the congress at Washington,[Pg 187] he was fated to hear his conclusions voted down by a resolution of the body. He made no reply, and many believe his opinions had been modified. This journey to the United States in 1908 was his first trip to this country and America’s savants strove to pay him the honors due. He was the distinguished guest at a New York dinner. It was there that Andrew Carnegie called him one of the “heroes of civilization.”

Dr. Koch received the Harden medal in recognition of his eminent services to medical science and public health, the Nobel Medicine Prize, amounting to $40,000, for his researches looking to the prevention and cure of tuberculosis, and many minor honors.

Myra Kelly (Mrs. Allan Macnaughton), affectionately known to many thousands of readers as the writer of stories of Ghetto children, died yesterday in Torquay, England.

Ten years or so ago a newspaper man was dining one evening with Dr. James T. Kelly, who asked for advice concerning his daughter’s troubles with magazine editors. This seemed like the preface to a familiar story—the young woman had literary ability which the editors persistently refused to recognize. What was to be done?

But the story was not along that familiar line.

“My daughter, Myra,” said Dr. Kelly when his companion asked how he could help, “is teaching in a downtown East Side school. All of us at[Pg 188] home have been entertained by her stories of her pupils and I urged her to write some of them. She was timid about it because of the tales of often rejected manuscripts by unknown writers and did not say that she would make the trial.

“Unknown to me she did, though, and, determined to get over the agony of unanimous rejection as soon as possible, she made three copies of her story and posted one each to three magazine editors.

“This morning she came to me in distress with three letters from three editors, three checks, and three requests for more stories.”

Dr. Kelly’s companion agreed to act as diplomatic agent; he saw the three editors, settled the matter of first choice by lot, and gave the bewildered young school teacher’s promise of other stories in turn to the other two editors.

That was the unusual manner of entrance into the field of story writing of Myra Kelly, then a teacher in the primary grade of Public School 147.

The opinions of the magazine editors were speedily justified. Readers demanded more stories about “Isidore Belchatosky,” there were enthusiastic encores for further comment by “Morris Mogilewsky,” subscribers would not be denied more of the wisdom of “Becky Zalmonowsky,” and “Patrick Brennan,” whose father had resisted the tide which had swept most of his race away from Poverty Hollow, had friends by the thousands among magazine readers.

For the first story Myra Kelly was glad to accept $50; within a year she got $500 for every story she wrote.

And all she had done, she often said, was simply to write down the stories she told at home of the queer deeds and views of the Ghetto children to whom she was teaching a, b,[Pg 189] c,—and deportment. But these stories were so very unlike any others from out of that world “east of the Bowery,” reproduced so quaintly the dialects, so accurately the points of view, gave such a new, deep insight into that seething world where there were hundreds of thousands of citizens in the making, that their author quickly became famous and prosperous.

But Miss Kelly kept on with her work in that East Broadway school, and remained where she had elected to teach, in the lower grade. She might have had higher grade classes, for she had been specially prepared for her profession by post-graduate studies. But the little folk from the tenements seemed to her to deserve the best instruction that could be given to them not only in a, b, c, but in how to look upon life, domestic and civil. Also she kept on writing stories until they grew into books, “Little Citizens,” “Isle of Dreams,” and “Wards of Liberty,” and these books, selling by many large editions, had a big influence in shaping the work of many societies and organizations trying to help make good citizens out of the children of the Ghetto.

“Miss Bailey” was the name of the “Teacher” in those stories, and what teacher had to overcome in respect to her pupils’ views on some familiar aspects of American history is shown in this scene from one of her stories:

“Ain’t George Washington made shoots mit pistols?” demands Isidore.

“Yes, he did,” admitted Miss Bailey.

“Ain’t Teddy Rosenfelt hit mans? Und ain’t they made him President over it? On’y that ain’t how they makes mit mine uncle. They don’t make him Presidents nor papas, neither. They takes and puts something from iron on his hands so he couldn’t to talk, even. Then they puts him in a wagon und they says they sends him over the water.”

“Where?” asked the teacher.

“Over the river where islands is and prisons stands. That’s how they makes mit him, the while he hits somebody mit pistols. I guess they don’t know about[Pg 190] George and Teddy. They makes them—mine uncle tells you how they makes George and Teddy—Presidents over it.”

“But that was from long, Izzie,” Eva reminded him.

“And altogether different,” added Miss Bailey.

“An’ me pop wasn’t there; he’d a pinched ’em,” said Patrick.

“Und George had his gang along,” observed Nathan Spiderwitz.

“Und Izzie,” said Morris Mogilewsky, summing the matter up, “George Wash’ton, he ain’t hit mans in legs mit shootin’ pistols out killin’ ’em. You couldn’t to be Presidents or papas over that. George Wash’ton he kills ’em all bloody und dead. He kills bunches of tousens of mans. Why ain’t your uncle kill somebody?”

“He hits him in the leg,” reiterated Isidore sadly.

“But he ain’t killed ’em. Und, Izzie, sooner you ain’t killed somebody bloody und dead, you couldn’t to be President and papas of countries.”

In 1905 Miss Kelly married Allan MacNaughton. Her husband met financial reverses, her own health failed, and she was unable to do much more literary work.

Mrs. MacNaughton, who was born in Dublin, Ireland, about thirty years ago, came to this city with her father, Dr. James E. Kelly, when she was a young child and received her education in this city.