Bubonic plague: its course and symptoms and means of prevention and treatment / by Dr José Verdes Montenegro ; authorised translation by W. Munro.

  • Verdes Montenegro, José, 1865-
Date:
1900
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Licence: In copyright

Credit: Bubonic plague: its course and symptoms and means of prevention and treatment / by Dr José Verdes Montenegro ; authorised translation by W. Munro. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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

    18/90 (page 14)
    sometimes after it was over. The facts already mentioned make us believe that the bacillus can easily recover its pathogenic activity under certain conditions, as when placed in a medium exceptionally favourable to its develop- ment (the nasal mucous membrane in the experiments of Batzaroff), or on association with other microbes. It has been said that desiccation rapidly kills the microbe; this is little likely. Prolonged desiccation in vacuo of a part of infected spleen is impotent to destroy it; at the end of three or four weeks a particle of it, powdered and injected with sterilized water, produced the disease in the animal experimented on and caused its death in the usual time. When desiccation occurs in the earth, in three weeks the virulence appears to diminish. The assertion that damp and dark localities favour the development of the disease appears to be equally rash. We will see in the study of the epidemiology how little influence these places have in the propagation of the plague ; but besides this, the results of the experiment of Simond are against the supposition. In a plate of very virulent cultivation in gelatine, placed in a dark and damp house, the rapid proliferation of fungus and saprophytes strangled the bacillus in two days, and inoculation produced no result. Although the bacillus of plague is pathogenic, not only in man, but also in various other animals, as rats, cats, pigs, sheep, oxen, etc., it is not so to an equal extent in all; besides, the infection of an animal by the pathological products from another of a distinct species does not always give any result, and when it does, there appear, in virtue of the transmission, very considerable differences in the intensity of the transmitted disease. This makes it appear that sometimes a different microbe is in question. The experiments of Lawson show that the plague of oxen is