Two years later he again brought himself into the spotlight when sons of parish priests were expelled from the Military Medical Academy in Saint Petersburg, where he lectured on physiology. He resigned from his post saying, “I am also the son of a priest, and if they are expelled, then so am I!”
Throughout his life, Ivan Pavlov received numerous honors, among them an honorary doctorate from Cambridge University and acceptance into the Order of the Legion of Honour from the Medical Academy of Paris.
Robert Koch (1843–1910)
1905 Physiology or Medicine
For his investigations and discoveries in relation to tuberculosis.
Born in Clausthal, Germany, Robert Heinrich Hermann Koch was expected to become a shoemaker, but he showed methodical persistence and intelligence from a very early age. To the surprise of his parents, at five he taught himself to read by studying newspapers, and it became evident that he was destined to be more than a shoemaker. Koch’s distinctive drive and ambition led him to study medicine in the hope of becoming a doctor.
In high school he showed a great aptitude for biology and developed a desire to travel, which confirmed his early ambitions. In 1862 he enrolled at the University of Göttingen to study medicine. When he finished his studies four years later he practiced medicine in various places around Germany until 1870, when he volunteered for the Franco-Prussian War.
After the war Koch realized that his vocation lay in a different field, the natural sciences; although abandoning his career as a doctor, a resolve to help the needy was still foremost in the young German’s mind. Researching the causes of disease and their prevention soon occupied his time.
Koch was in Wollstein when an anthrax epidemic attacked the farm animals in the district, and he immediately decided to analyze the disease. His wife had given him a new microscope for his 28th birthday, which greatly enriched the poorly equipped laboratory in the couple’s apartment. Koch worked without other adequate scientific equipment, access to libraries or contact with other scientists.
Around 1880 his studies on the anthrax bacteria earned him a job in the Reichs-Gesundheitsamt (the Imperial Health Bureau) laboratories in Berlin. Initially he was given a small, insufficient laboratory but soon was moved into better surroundings, where he worked with assistants. A few years after arriving in Berlin, Koch discovered tubercle bacillus, now known as Koch’s bacillus. This research was of such importance to the scientific field that it earned him the 1905 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine.
Although perhaps best known for his work on tuberculosis, Robert Koch dedicated valuable research time to a number of human and animal diseases, including cholera, leprosy, bovine plague, bubonic plague and malaria. These studies allowed him to realize his early dreams of traveling, and he spent considerable periods in Egypt, India, Africa and Italy doing research.
Bertha von Suttner (1843–1914)
1905 Peace
For her activities in favor of peace, both for her writings and her active presence in peace societies and international conferences.
Baroness Bertha Sophie Felicita von Suttner, born Countess Kinsky von Chinic und Tettau, always said that Alfred Nobel, an intimate friend, wanted her to be the first person to receive the Nobel Peace Prize. This was not to be the case, however; the first female peace activist of the modern age had to wait four years, until 1905, while seeing her male friends and fellow pacifists receive the award.
A native of Prague, at the time Austrian territory, von Suttner was educated by her mother in accordance with aristocratic perceptions and traditions she accepted for the first half of her life. These early years were very difficult for her. At the age of 30 she accept a position of teacher-companion to a Mr. Suttner’s four daughters. It was then, however, that she fell in love with her pupils’ brother.
His parents opposed the marriage, refusing to accept her as a daughter-in-law, but the marriage went ahead in secret. The newlyweds were forced to move to the Caucasus, where they lived in precarious circumstances, surviving by writing and giving music and language lessons. Only after nine years did the Suttners accept their daughter-in-law and invite the couple to live in the family castle in Austria, where days were filled with parties, writing and studying.
In the winter of 1886, Bertha von Suttner became deeply interested in the new International Arbitration and Peace Association. This organization was established in England and was working to establish a court of international arbitration, the headquarters of which would act as a stage for nations to air and resolve their differences. Suttner’s emergence on the global stage started with the publication in 1889 of her book Die Waffen nieder (Lay Down Your Arms), in which she showed the true horror of war. She reached the pinnacle of her fame during the Hague Peace Conference in 1899.
The much sought-after Nobel Prize was awarded to her for her activities in the name of peace as well as for her writings and active presence in peace societies. She was the second woman to receive a Nobel Prize, but, unlike Marie Curie, Bertha von Suttner did not share the honor. Her newspaper articles were also important in preserving peace, and von Suttner was recognized as the first woman to write political journalism of exceptional quality.
Two months before the outbreak of World War I, Bertha von Suttner, now a Baroness, died in Vienna, apparently of cancer; she was thus spared witnessing the beginning of a war she had so tirelessly fought against.
Santiago Ramón y Cajal (1852–1934)
1906 Physiology or Medicine
In recognition of their work on the structure of the nervous system.
Santiago Ramón y Cajal was born in the village of Petilla de Aragón, Spain, the son of an anatomy professor at the University of Saragossa. Although a quiet and intelligent boy, Cajal did not dedicate himself to his studies, preferring the arts, and his father did nothing to encourage his son’s emerging vocation. Justo Ramón Cajal, in fact, did everything he could to take him away from the world of the pencil and the paintbrush, even forcing the boy to apprentice to a barber and a shoemaker.
However, Cajal went on to study medicine at Saragossa, where his drawing skills served him well in anatomical studies, and in 1873 he joined the expeditionary army as a doctor. Sent to Cuba, where the Spanish were fighting against an independence movement, he contracted several serious diseases, including malaria and dysentery, which almost cost him his life. On his return to Spain he quickly recovered and, encouraged by his once skeptical father, decided to continue his studies. Cajal failed twice before becoming a professor of descriptive anatomy in 1883 at the University of Valencia, where he began a career as a researcher in the field of histology.
In 1887 he entered University of Barcelona as professor of normal histology and pathological anatomy, but he did not lose his enthusiasm for research and concentrated on the study of the nervous system. By showing that nerve cells are independent units and are related to each other through their long fibrous extensions, Cajal lay the foundation of modern neuroscience. This theory led to the theory of polarization, which describes how the nervous impulse is transmitted in one direction only, passing through the axon to the dendrites and then to the rest of the cell body.
Cajal transferred to the University of Madrid in 1892, which marked the beginning of a new stage in his research — a concentration on the interior of nerve cells and