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George Miller Sternberg

Brigadier General George Miller Sternberg, MD (1838-1915) was a U.S. Army physician who is considered to have been the first bacteriologist in the United States. He was U.S. Army Surgeon General from 1893 to 1902. Pioneering German bacteriologist Robert Koch honored him with the sobriquet, “Father of American Bacteriology”.

In 1860, he was graduated from the College of Physicians and Surgeons, in New York, New York. As a young assistant surgeon, he was captured and escaped at the First Battle of Bull Run (1861).

In 1866, after the Civil War, Dr. Sternberg was assigned to Fort Harker, near Ellsworth in Kansas. His first wife, Louisa, died there in 1867 during a cholera epidemic that killed about 75 people at the fort.

Besides his military duties, Dr. Sternberg was also interested in fossils and began collecting leaf imprints from the nearby Dakota Sandstone Formation. Some of his specimens went back East where they were studied by the famous paleobotanist, Leo Lesquereux. During the Indian Wars of the late 1860s, Dr. Sternberg collected vertebrate fossils, including shark teeth, fish remains and mosasaur bones, from the Smoky Hill Chalk and Pierre Shale formations in western Kansas, and sent the specimens back to Washington, D.C., where they were eventually curated in the United States National Museum (Smithsonian Institution). There they were studied and later described in publications by Joseph Leidy. The type specimen of the giant Late Cretaceous fish, Xiphactinus audax, was collected by Dr. Sternberg. His work was also credited by Edward D. Cope and Samuel W. Williston. He also was responsible for getting his younger brother, Charles H. Sternberg, started in paleontology. Charles Sternberg would later credit his older brother (Dr. Sternberg) for getting many other paleontologists of the day interested in the fossil resources of Kansas.

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In 1881, he isolated the pneumococcus, independently and simultaneously with Louis Pasteur. He created the US Army enlisted hospital corps (“medics”) in 1887 and wrote the first US bacteriology textbook in 1892. He served as United States Army Surgeon General from 1893 to 1902 and founded the Army Medical School (precursor of today's Walter Reed Army Institute of Research) in 1893. He instituted the famous “Walter Reed Boards” in 1898 and 1900 and in 1901, founded the United States Army Nurse Corps.

• Frank Heynick, author of a gigantic tome, Jews and Medicine: An Epic Saga (2003), was dismayed to come across the name of George Sternberg as he was finalizing his manuscript. He had not mentioned Sternberg in his book and the idea of researching yet another life, adding more pages to the 600 page book, and trimming back other parts was disheartening. Further research on Sternberg’s background ensued. As it turned out Sternberg was not, in fact, Jewish — “Thank heavens!” said the ecstatic Heynick.

• "The trials and tribulations of George Miller Sternberg (1838-1915)—America's first bacteriologist," Perspectives in Biology and Medicine, Summer 1993. Vol. 36, Iss. 4; pg. 666.
• Gross, Max, "Doctor Writes ‘Epic Saga’ of Jews in Medicine", The Jewish Daily Forward, Friday, 15 August 2003

• United States Army Medical Department Museum, Ft Sam Houston, San Antonio, Texas

• Biography at Virtualology.com
• Dr. George M. Sternberg - Oceans of Kansas
• Xiphactinus audax - Oceans of Kansas

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