George M. Sternberg (1838-1915), a U.S. Army physician, is considered the "Father of American Bacteriology." He had survived cholera but lost his wife in the Kansas epidemic of 1867. He translated Les bactéries by Antoine Magnin (1848-1926), the French botanist and professor of medicine at Lyon; this translation, titled The Bacteria and published in Boston by Little, Brown & Co., became the first textbook of bacteriology in the U.S. A revised edition appeared in 1884. In between, Sternberg published his major work, a Textbook of Bacteriology (New York: William Wood, 1892), which supplanted Magnin's as a textbook in the US. Sternberg became U.S. Surgeon General in 1893, a position he held until 1902. Over the course of his career, he worked on yellow fever, tuberculosis and typhoid, and in 1886 he confirmed results flowing out of European centers. In 1892, during the cholera epidemic in Hamburg, Germany, he directed the quarantine station for receiving immigrants on the New York City dockside. He was the first U.S. bacteriologist to photograph the tubercle bacillus. Cf. Walter Reed.


Created 2 February 2023