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The Footnote June 24, 2026 · Regensburg, Bavaria

The 14th-Century German Cleric Who Argued the Black Death Was Not the Jews' Fault

Konrad of Megenberg was a Bavarian cleric and natural philosopher who wrote a Latin treatise during the 1349 Black Death arguing on medical and theological grounds that the well-poisoning accusations against European Jews were factually false. The treatise circulated in fewer than two dozen manuscript copies and had substantially no documented effect on the simultaneous massacres.

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The Footnote June 24, 2026 · Munich Institute of Hygiene

The German Hygienist Who Drank a Flask of Cholera to Prove Robert Koch Wrong

In October 1892 the Munich hygienist Max von Pettenkofer asked [Robert Koch's](/articles/robert-koch-cholera-1883) laboratory to send him a fresh culture of *Vibrio cholerae*. He drank approximately a billion organisms in a flask of beef broth, in front of academic witnesses, to demonstrate that the bacterium alone could not cause cholera. He survived the experiment. Nine years later he shot himself.

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