Historians of the control of tuberculosis regard Hermann Biggs
as the model public health administrator, and as the most
brilliant strategist and successful tactician in the campaign
that controlled tuberculosis. The soundness of his public health
administration briefly impressed itself upon a wider medical
public a decade ago; when workers moved to control the
insurgence of multidrug-resistant Mycobacterium tuberculosis in
New York City in the early 1990's, they used Biggsian procedures
and relied on Biggsian statue law from a Biggs was trained as a
pathologist and his professional career, during its formative
period in the 1880's and 1890's was laboratory-based. This
account stresses the role that Biggs, the keen student and
practitioner of laboratory diagnosis, played in the success of
Biggs the public health administrator. Hermann Michael Biggs was
born in the hamlet of Trumanburg, in the township of Ulysses,
New York, on 29 September 1859. Although his adult career was to
be spent managing, with consumma