Insects and disease / by John B. Huber.

  • Huber, John Bessner, 1864-
Date:
1908
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: Insects and disease / by John B. Huber. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by The Royal College of Surgeons of England. The original may be consulted at The Royal College of Surgeons of England.

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    instance, both living and dead, are attacked by them; of this more presently. Weber has investigated certain small insects, the procidse, which are to be found in great pro- fusion in barns and outhouses where animals are kept. These are chewing insects, fond of fari- naceous food; they live about troughs, granaries, feed-chests and mangers. There is a wingless form of them which is known popularly as the “death watch” and which has often been mis- taken for lice. A tuberculous cow will deposit sputum swarming with bacilli mixed with meal over the woodwork of her stall. These insects consume this feed and fill their stomachs with saliva, sputum and meal. Weber held a single sheet of a newspaper under the bag in a room and with a few taps caught two thousand speci- mens. He found that some of these harbored tubercle bacilli. He injected the ingested ma- terial into the peritoneal cavity of guinea pigs and developed tuberculous disease in the latter. It is not at all unlikely that cancer is an in- fectious disease. Tynes* describes what cer- tainly seems to be an epidemic of cancer extend- ing through a number of years in and about Fishersville, Va., the region in which he has been practicing. The work of Gaylord and Clowes in the Cancer Laboratory of the New York State Department of Health would seem to demonstrate the communicability of cancer. It is relevant, therefore, to note the paper by Webb in the London Lancet of March 21, igo8, entitled: “Do Fleas Spread Cancer?” He describes a case, from which he concludes: A woman, aged fifty-eight, in good health, visited toward the end of November, 1907, a * Journal of the American Medical Association, March zi, 1908.