The common bacterial infections of the digestive tract and the intoxications arising from them / by C.A. Herter.

  • Herter, Christian Archibald, 1865-1910.
Date:
1907
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: The common bacterial infections of the digestive tract and the intoxications arising from them / by C.A. Herter. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by The University of Leeds Library. The original may be consulted at The University of Leeds Library.

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    study of the human faeces, but I believe it has here an important clinical application. Although it is true that B. aerogenes capsulatus can be isolated from the fseces of a majority of adult individuals, including very many who are in excellent health, it is also true that there are wide differences in the number of capsulati habitually present in the case of different individuals. There are some young persons between the ages of five and twenty years from whom it is either very difficult to obtain B. aerogenes capsulatus by plating or whose movements give no evidence whatever of its presence. If we pre- pare a suspension of the faeces from such individuals by grinding one gram of the fresh material with nine cubic centimeters of 0.85 per cent, salt solution and filtering through absorbent cotton, we can inject intravenously one or two cubic centimeters of this suspension into a rabbit and then mcubate the quickly killed rabbit for five hours at 37° C. without obtaining evidence of the abundant presence of the gas-bacillus. On opening a rabbit which has been thus incubated, one finds none of the signs of the activity of the gas-bacillus — no accu- mulation of gas in the liver or vessels or in the con- nective tissues or serous cavities. Moreover, smears made from the liver blood or the auricular blood either do not show the presence of capsulatus at all, or these organisms are present only in small numbers. If, however, the foregomg experiment be made with the facal material derived from a patient with pernicious anemia or from a person suffermg from a capsulatus diarrhoea, one gener- aUy gets an entu-ely different result. At the end of five