Koch established a formal procedure for proving that a particular microorganism causes a particular disease. The organism must be found in every case, isolated and grown in culture, produce the disease when introduced into a healthy host, and be recovered again from that host.
Before Koch, causation in medicine was asserted. After Koch, it had to be demonstrated, in four steps, in order.
Unter vier Augen — under four eyes, meaning between two people.
Das bleibt unter uns — that stays among us.
Schmutzige Wäsche wäscht man nicht in der Öffentlichkeit — one does not wash dirty linen in public.
Der Flurfunk — corridor radio, the German word for office rumour, and it is what a public hearing is understood to feed.
Die Handwerksrolle is a public register of qualified craft businesses, maintained by the chambers of crafts. Entry requires the Meister qualification in the relevant trade. You are not a roofer because you roof. You are a roofer because you are in the roll.
Mit Augenmaß — with eye-measure. The German phrase for judgment exercised in proportion, and it is praise.
Fingerspitzengefühl — fingertip feeling. Sensitivity in handling a situation, and it is what experience is supposed to produce.
Nach bestem Wissen und Gewissen — to the best of knowledge and conscience. A formula used in German declarations and reports where certainty is not available.
Das Rabattgesetz. From 1 January 1934 until 25 July 2001, German law restricted the discounts a retailer could give a consumer. Section 2 capped the cash discount at 3 percent of the price.
Germany was the only country in the European Union with a general prohibition on discounts — the government’s own bill said so when proposing repeal. The stated purpose was to stop customers being tempted too strongly by the size of a reduction.
A seventy-year-old law existed on the premise that a price is a fact, and that moving it around is a trick played on the buyer.
Long-livedness. A German product virtue with a noun of its own, appearing in ecolabel criteria, consumer testing and advertising copy. The lifespan is a stated specification rather than an accident of build quality.
In 1858, at the Pathological Institute in Berlin, Virchow published Die Cellularpathologie. His argument was that disease does not reside in organs or tissues in general, but originates in individual cells, and that the nature of a disease can be understood by looking at those cells under a microscope.
He also developed the first systematic method of autopsy, and the modern autopsy still uses his technique.
He is called the father of modern pathology. Pathology is diagnosis pushed as far down as it will go.
Die Aussprache. A talking-out. The German word for the conversation in which a difficulty is worked through between the people involved. It is arranged, it is expected to take a while, and it happens without spectators.
German uses both words, and only one of them is a compliment. Generalist is not an insult exactly. But it describes an absence, and in a German professional context the absence is of a field.
German administrative and legal language returns to it constantly — im Einzelfall, in the individual case, Einzelfallprüfung, individual examination. The general rule is stated and the particular case is then examined against it.