December 20th
- Japanese bacteriologist who, with Alexandre Yersin, co-discovered the infectious agent of bubonic plague, Pasteurella pestis (now called Yersinia pestis), during an epidemic in Hong Kong (1894).
- During 1885-91, as a bacteriologist at Robert Koch’s laboratory in Germany, he worked with Emil von Behring on tetanus and diphtheria, demonstrating the value of antitoxin in conferring passive immunity.
- They showed that nonimmune animals, injected with increasing sublethal doses of tetanus toxin, became resistant to the disease.
