The Alleged Discovery of the Virus of Epidemic Influenza

Abstract

THE recent report in the daily press that the cause of influenza had been discovered by Drs. P. K. Olitsky and F. L. Gates, of the Rockefeller Institute, N.Y., might lead the layman to believe that the problem was solved. There is no published evidence to show that this is correct. The facts are briefly these. Influenza is the greatest pandemic disease known and may be traced to the most remote periods of which we have historic data. One of its great outbursts (1889–1890) coincided with the bacteriological epoch in science, and by means of the technique devised by Robert Koch, one of his assistants, R. Pfeiffer, distinguished by the accuracy of all his work, isolated (1892) a small rod-shaped microbe since universally called Bacillus in-fluenzce. This microbe, not easy to cultivate, was missed by all the investigators before Pfeiffer, but his work was subsequently regarded as correct.