Max von Pettenkofer

A Bavarian chemist and hygienist who helped establish hygiene as an experimental science rather than a matter of theory alone. Pettenkofer argued that clean water, fresh air and proper sewage disposal were central to public health, and the Institute of Hygiene he founded in Munich became an internationally influential model, cited as an inspiration for later schools such as the Johns Hopkins School of Hygiene and Public Health. He was also a committed opponent of the germ theory of disease, holding an anti-contagionist view that combined multiple environmental factors with microbial agents in causing illness, a position that put him in a famous and public dispute with Robert Koch over how cholera spread. Despite that disagreement, later shown to be mistaken, his championing of sanitary engineering and municipal water and sewage reform had a lasting effect on nineteenth century public health practice, and his name is inscribed among the pioneers of public health on the frieze of the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine.