Blame Dr. Robert Koch, the country doc who discovered the TB bacillus (and the guy the Koch postulate is named after).
Bred as a food source, guinea pigs were gentle, quiet, unperturbed by cages, and—by a fortunate coincidence, perhaps—prone to infectious disease. (You can give a Cavy full-blown tuberculosis with a single Mycobacterium tuberculosis, says TB researcher David McMurray.*) By the time he was named to a prestigious professorship in Berlin, Koch was using guinea pigs by the armful.
the article goes on to mark the ups and downs of scientific theory in those days.
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