History[edit]
The story of the term Salmonella started in 1885 with the discovery of the bacterium Salmonella enterica (var. Choleraesuis) by medical research scientist Theobald Smith. At the time Theobald was working as a research laboratory assistant in the Veterinary Division of the United States Department of Agriculture. The department was under the administration of Daniel Elmer Salmon, a veterinary pathologist, and that is for whom the Salmonella was named.[3]
During the search for the cause of hog cholera it was proposed that the causal agent be named Salmonella. While it happened eventually that Salmonella did not cause that cholera (its enteric pathogen was actually a virus),[4] it turned out that all species of the bacterial genus Salmonella cause infectious diseases. In 1900 J. Lignières re-adopted the name for the many subspecies of Salmonella, after Smith's first type-strain Salmonella cholera.