![]() ![]() This important discovery makes it hard for us to imagine looking through a microscope and not seeing Yersinia pestis. It showed us a microbe invisible to the naked eye. The bacteriological understanding of plague made the late 19th-century microscope an instrument of revelation. Photographs show us what this virulent bacillus looks like in blood and tissue samples examined in the laboratory with high-powered instruments. What does the blood of plague-infected bodies look like under a microscope? Since Alexandre Yersin’s and Kitasato Shibasaburō’s simultaneous discovery of the plague bacillus in Hong Kong in 1894, we have a very specific answer to this question because we already know what to look for: a rod-shaped anaerobic microorganism known as Yersinia pestis. Countway Library of Medicine, Rare Books, RC171. Athanasius Kircher, Scrutinium physico-medicum contagiosae luis, qui pestis dicatur (Typis Mascardi: Romae, 1658).įrancis A. ![]()
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