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
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“In history the great moment is, when the savage is just ceasing to be a savage, with all his hairy Pelasgic strength directed on his opening sense of beauty;—and you have Pericles and Phidias,—and not yet passed over into the Corinthian civility. Everything good in nature and in the world is in that moment of transition, when the swarthy juices still flow plentifully from nature, but their astrigency or acridity is got out by ethics and humanity.”
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