A HISTORIC VIAL

Museum Director Adrianne Noe, Ph.D. (left) receives a donation from Jesse S. Tucker on behalf of the Connecticut Department of Health, which discovered a vial containing a brown liquid along with two old and fragile documents in an old safe when the facility was relocated in 1983. One document, written in German, provided information related to use of the liquid and another in English stated, "first sample of tuberculin brought to America, 1892." Officials in Connecticut labeled the specimen the "Koch Tuberculin Vial" after German bacteriologist Prof. Heinrich Hermann Robert Koch, M.D., who was awarded the Nobel prize for his experiments in 1905 with tubercle bacillus, which led to his conclusion that human and bovine tuberculosis are not identical. The artifact complements the museum's substantial collection documenting the history of infectious disease research.