Escherich and Escherichia

The purpose of this chapter is threefold: (1) to give an outline of the life and the various achievements of Theodor Escherich, (2) to provide a background to the discovery of Bacterium coli commune (now Escherichia coli ), and (3) to indicate the enormous impact of studies with this organism. Theodor Escherich's success in discovering Bacterium coli commune stemmed from a mixture of luck and of the limitations in bacteriological techniques available at the time. Luck came in three forms: the preponderance of this organism in the stools of infants in contrast to adults, the obligate, rather than what he called facultative, presence of this organism in all the stools that he examined, and above all the remarkable ease with which it could be cultivated. The discovery of Escherichia coli in 1885 occurred at a time that saw the confluence of a number of factors. This discovery occurred during the so-called golden age of bacteriology when it became abundantly clear that newly discovered pathogenic bacteria caused many diseases—for example, tuberculosis was shown to be due to an infectious bacterium and cholera was shown to be due to the so-called comma bacillus.