Botulinum toxin
In 1895 (seventy-five years later), Émile van Ermengem, professor of bacteriology and a student of Robert Koch, correctly described "Clostridium botulinum" as the bacterial source of the toxin. Thirty-four attendees at a funeral were poisoned by eating partially salted ham, an extract of which was found to cause botulism-like paralysis in laboratory animals. Van Ermengem isolated and grew the bacterium, and described its toxin, which was later purified by P Tessmer Snipe and Hermann Sommer.
Pertussis toxin
PT clearly plays a central role in the pathogenesis of pertussis although this was discovered only in the early 1980s. The appearance of pertussis is quite recent, compared with other epidemic infectious diseases. The earliest mention of pertussis, or whooping cough, is of an outbreak in Paris in 1414. This was published in Moulton’s The Mirror of Health, in 1640. Another epidemic of pertussis took place in Paris in 1578 and was described by a contemporary observer, Guillaume de Baillou. Pertussis was well known throughout Europe by the middle of the 18th century. Jules Bordet and Octave Gengou described in 1900 the finding of a new “ovoid bacillus” in the sputum of a 6-month-old infant with whooping cough. They were also the first to cultivate "Bordetella pertussis" at the Pasteur Institute in Brussels in 1906.