One Sunday morning in 1975, the clinical microbiologist Martin Skirrow, who has died aged 95, was checking a blood sample from a severely ill one-month-old baby in his laboratory at Worcester Royal Infirmary.
His microscope revealed “a melee of tiny darting rods” with a spiral shape enabling them to corkscrew their way into mucous membranes. What he saw were campylobacter bacteria, and he later wrote that “few are fortunate enough to stumble fortuitously on something that has such far-reaching consequences”.
