Microbes in fermentation, putrefaction, and disease / by Charles Cameron.

Date:
1882
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Microbes in fermentation, putrefaction, and disease / by Charles Cameron. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh. The original may be consulted at the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh.

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    repeated cultivations of these microbes in the rabbit they could enormously increase their virulence. Thus, having injected from 1 to 10 drops of blood putrefied in the air into the veins of each of 48 rabbits they found that 26 of them died. Injecting 1 to 4 drops of the blood of one of the rabbits dead in this experiment into a number of others, they found that all inoculated perished. Following the same procedure, they found that at the fifth generation one- hunclredth part of a drop killed the animal in less than 20 hours. At the tenth generation they could kill a rabbit with the 20,000th part of a drop, and in subsequent genera- tions with even smaller amounts. Toussaint claims to have proved that the organism thus cultivated out is none other than the microbe of fowl cholera, of which we shall speak hereafter. The two forms of septic disease investigated by Pasteur are human septicemia and pyemia. In the first of these he has discovered a septic vibrio wonderfully akin in many respects to the microbe of butyric fermentation. Like that microbe, oxygen kills it, but like it, too, its germs are un- impaired even by compressed oxygen. They will germinate in carbonic gas, or even in vacuo. Like it, too, it manifests its fermentative action by the liberation of hydrogen and carbonic acid. Its habitat par excellence is in the serum of the abdominal cavity, and in the muscles of tlio ab- domen. It does not pass into the blood till the last stage of the disease or after death, and in that fluid it assumes an aspect of immoderate length, frequently passing beyond the entire field of the microscope, and a translucidity so great that it often escapes observation. When, however, adds Pasteur, one has once seen it, it can easily bo found “ creeping, floxuous, and separating the globules of the blood as a serpent separates the grass in a thicket.” This microbe does not give rise to the formation of pus, but apparently poisons its victim by the production of an