Complete Record - Heirs of Hippocrates No. 1881

JOHN TYNDALL (1820-1893) Essays on the floating-matter of the air in relation to putrefaction and infection. Longmans, Green 1881 xix, 338 [2] pp., illus. 19.2 cm.

Tyndall completed his secondary schooling in Ireland, the country of his birth. He worked and taught for nine years before entering the University of Marburg where he studied chemistry and physics and received the Ph.D. degree. In 1854 he was appointed professor of physics at the Royal Institution in London and was active there until his retirement in 1867. Tyndall is remembered for his work on the absorption of radiant heat by liquids and gases, the physical qualities of atmospheric light, the audibility of sounds, the transparency of gases, and the sterilization of air and liquids. Although not a physician, Tyndall made important contributions to the advancement of bacteriology in this basic book on the fundamental growth properties of bacteria. Tyndall showed that contaminating materials, such as bacteria, can be airborne, but that they may be fractionally sterilized by heat, a process now known as tyndallization. He also demonstrated the growth-inhibiting action of molds such as penicillium on bacteria, some fifty years before Fleming (see No. 2320).

See Related Record(s): 2320

Cited references: Cushing T200 (2nd ed., 1883); Garrison-Morton 2495

Gift of John Martin, M.D.