Download or read book Life with the Pneumococcus written by Robert Austrian and published by University of Pennsylvania Press. This book was released on 2016-11-11 with total page 180 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Because of the high fatality rate of untreated pneumococcal pneumonia, both the disease and its principal cause, the pneumococcus, were objects of intense scrutiny by physicians and bacteriologists during the last two decades of the nineteenth century and the first half of the twentieth. As a result, scientists learned much of the fundamental importance to microbiology, immunology, and genetics while developing the pneumococcal vaccine.