Thanks to our library staff and the people at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (from whom this comes) I was able to get a copy of the original “Gram Stain” paper…
I don’t know whether to be annoyed (that someone else beat me to it) or happy (because now I’ll be able to double-check my translation) but it appears the ASM actually already has a translation of the paper online. Interestingly, the attached commentary states that the Gram stain even works on bacterial protoplasts. If that’s true, then all this stuff I keep getting told about the action of the Gram stain being due to the cell walls themselves is incorrect. I wonder, do Gram-positive bacteria also have thicker inner membranes? Or is the commentary full of it?
Why this article didn’t originally show up when I was poking around Google looking for it by the title, I don’t know.
Next request will be for the “Everything is Everywhere” paper…