The Hygienic Laboratory, forerunner of the NIH

In the 1880s Congress charged the Marine Hospital Service, which ran hospitals for merchant seamen, with examining passengers on arriving ships for signs of infectious disease, above all cholera and yellow fever. European scientists were at the same time tying particular microbes to particular diseases, and in 1884 Robert Koch described the comma-shaped bacterium of cholera.

In 1887 the service authorized Joseph J. Kinyoun, a young physician who had done postgraduate work in Europe under Koch, to set up a one-room laboratory in the attic of its Marine Hospital at Stapleton, Staten Island. He called it a laboratory of hygiene, after German models, to show that its purpose was the public's health. The NIH dates the founding to August 1887. Within a few months Kinyoun had identified the cholera bacillus in suspected cases and showed it to colleagues under his Zeiss microscope, confirming their clinical diagnoses.

In 1891 the Hygienic Laboratory, as it came to be called, moved to Washington, D.C., near the Capitol. For the next decade Kinyoun was its only full-time staff member. He trained the service's officers in bacteriology and tested water purity and air pollution for the District of Columbia and Congress, and he directed the laboratory until April 1899. In 1901 Congress authorized $35,000 for a new building in which the laboratory could investigate infectious and contagious diseases and matters of public health. The NIH's own history treats that line in a routine supplemental appropriations act as its founding legislation.

The Biologics Control Act of 1902 made the laboratory responsible for regulating vaccines and antitoxins. A 1912 act, which renamed its parent agency the Public Health Service, allowed it to study noncontagious diseases and the pollution of streams and lakes. In 1916 its director, George McCoy, hired Ida Bengtson, its first woman bacteriologist.

The Ransdell Act of 1930 renamed the Hygienic Laboratory the National Institute of Health and authorized fellowships for research into basic biological and medical problems. The National Cancer Institute followed in 1937, and the move to a new campus in Bethesda, Maryland, began in 1938.