History
The method is named after its inventor, the Danish scientist Hans Christian Gram (1850–1938), who developed the technique while working with Carl Friedländer in the morgue of the city hospital in Berlin. Gram devised his technique not for the purpose of distinguishing one type of bacterium from another but to enable bacteria to be seen more readily in stained sections of lung tissue. He published his method in 1884, and included in his short report the observation that the Typhus bacillus did not retain the stain.
Read more about this topic: Gram Staining
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“We know only a single science, the science of history. One can look at history from two sides and divide it into the history of nature and the history of men. However, the two sides are not to be divided off; as long as men exist the history of nature and the history of men are mutually conditioned.”
—Karl Marx (1818–1883)
“We don’t know when our name came into being or how some distant ancestor acquired it. We don’t understand our name at all, we don’t know its history and yet we bear it with exalted fidelity, we merge with it, we like it, we are ridiculously proud of it as if we had thought it up ourselves in a moment of brilliant inspiration.”
—Milan Kundera (b. 1929)
“Regarding History as the slaughter-bench at which the happiness of peoples, the wisdom of States, and the virtue of individuals have been victimized—the question involuntarily arises—to what principle, to what final aim these enormous sacrifices have been offered.”
—Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831)