ABSTRACT
Perhaps the most memorable drama of bodily inequality before the external causes of disease was staged on 7 October 1892 in Munich by Max von Pettenkofer. On that day, the founder of scientific hygiene swallowed a pure culture of cholera bacilli. In the preceding two months, cholera had taken the lives of over 8,000 people in the city of Hamburg. Pettenkofer, however, survived his drink with nothing more than a bout of diarrhoea. Though remembered as the wrong-headed if heroic ‘last stand’ of anticontagionism against the bacteriological revolution of Pasteur and Koch, this simple self-experiment did create a riveting fact, a fact on whose existence everyone came to agree and puzzle over, not least Robert Koch himself (von Pettenkofer, 1892; Koch, 1893). 2 That Pettenkofer had lived with millions of cholera bacilli in his intestinal tract for over a week without suffering more than diarrhoea was a fact of immediate etiological relevance and, at the same time, of indeterminate meaning. It was a fact, moreover, of relevance to the wider structure of scientific medicine insofar as it was becoming, with the rise of bacteriology, a medicine of specific causes and insofar as it had been since the beginning of the nineteenth century a science of regular pathological reactions, a science of essentially equal bodies.
