On 9 April 1881 the Bradford Observer ran a lengthy report on a recent lecture delivered to the Leeds and West Riding Medico-Chirurgical Society. The speaker was Professor William Smith Greenfield, then superintendent of the Brown Animal Sanatory Institution in London, and the topic of his talk was ‘Woolsorters Disease’. Among the members present were John Henry Bell, whom we have already encountered in his role as Bradford's leading anthrax investigator at that time, Harris Butterfield, Medical Officer of Health for Bradford, and at least four members of the Commission on Woolsorters' Diseases: Drs Goyder, Lodge, Jr, Rabagliati and Tibbits. The lecture was, by all accounts, well received and punctuated with applause, and it referred extensively to cases of the disease that had recently occurred in and around Bradford. What is particularly striking about the content of Greenfield's lecture, however, is the fact that he did not make a single reference to either Robert Koch or Louis Pasteur when discussing significant recent research into anthrax.

This is surprising for two reasons. Firstly, Greenfield was one of the most important British veterinary scientists of this period, and he should therefore be expected to have taken great interest in the work of both Pasteur and Koch.