Brucellosis, also called Bang's disease, Crimean fever, Gibraltar fever, Malta fever, Maltese fever, Mediterranean fever, rock fever, or undulant fever, is a highly contagious zoonosis caused by ingestion of unsterilized milk or meat from infected animals or close contact with their secretions. Transmission from human to human, through sexual contact or from mother to child, is rare but possible.Brucella spp. are small, Gram-negative, non-motile, non-spore-forming, rod shaped (coccobacilli) bacteria. They function as facultative intracellular parasites causing chronic disease, which usually persists for life. Symptoms include profuse sweating and joint and muscle pain. Brucellosis has been recognized in animals including humans since the 20th century.

Under the name Malta fever, the disease now called brucellosis first came to the attention of British medical officers in the 1850s in Malta during the Crimean War. The causal relationship between organism and disease was first established in 1887 by Dr. David Bruce.

Richard Oehler (27 February 1878, Heckholzhausen, Hesse-Nassau - 13 November 1948) was a German Nietzsche scholar – an early editor of the philosopher's works, and author of Friedrich Nietzsche und die deutsche Zukunft (Leipzig: Armanen-Verlag, 1935), which has been characterized by Walter Kaufmann as "one of the first Nazi books on Nietzsche" (Basic Writings of Nietzsche, New York: The Modern Library, 2000, p. 387, n. 27). His brother was Max Oehler, who directed the Nietzsche Archive in Weimar, Germany. The Oehlers were family relations of the Nietzsches.