A medical doctor who claimed in 1919 to have found a cure for a great variety of illnesses including cancer, tuberculosis, and leprosy. He was awarded a Ph.D. in chemistry in 1917 from the University of Michigan; in 1918 he received a degree in medicine from Wayne University. Koch taught histology and embryology at Michigan from 1910 to 1913 and physiology in the Medical College at Wayne from 1914 to 1919.
In 1919 Dr. Koch claimed to have synthesized a substance that he called glyoxylide which cured four out of five patients, no matter what their illness, by stimulating the patient’s own ability to manufacture remedies. He published two books explaining the claimed scientific basis for his cure: Cancer and its Allied Diseases (1929, revised 1933) and The Chemistry of Natural Immunity (1938). In 1943 and 1948, the U.S. government twice took Koch to court to stop him from performing what it saw as a potentially dangerous procedure. Government chemists testified that glyoxylide ampules were indistinguishable from distilled water. The trial was unsuccessful, and Koch continued to sell thousands of glyoxylide ampules. The Christian Medical Research League, Detroit, still gives the injections.