In ancient Greece, Hippocrates reported cure of an arthritis case by tooth extraction. Yet modern focal infection theory awaited Robert Koch's establishment of medical bacteriology in the late 1870s to early 1880s. In 1890, Willoughby D Miller attributed a set of oral diseases to infections, and a set of general diseases—as of lung, stomach, brain abscesses, and other conditions—to those infectious oral diseases. In 1894, Miller became the first to reveal existence of bacteria in samples of dental pulp. Miller advised root canal therapy. Yet focal infection theory met a cultural climate where ancient and folk ideas, long entrenched via Galenic humoral medicine, found new outlets through bacteriology—a pillar of the new "scientific medicine".