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.

    19/90 (page 15)
    not the same as the human, and thus it will be generally considered that the bacillus met with by Kitasato in an ox dead of plague is the specific bacillus of that disease, which has no direct relationship to that of man. ; In cases in which the disease is transmissible from one species of animal to another, although with variations in the intensity, it appears reasonable to attribute these differences to the work of adaptation of the microbe to the new medium, which, so far as it is concerned, the animal of a distinct species from that in which it was developed is to it. Although the rat is thought to be the mammifer to which is to be attributed the most important role in the propaga- tion of the plague, the infection of the animal with patho- logical products from man is not very virulent in the first individual inoculated ! If a second animal is infected from the first, the virulence augments, and in a third experiment it actually reaches the normal intensity of the disease in the species in question. It appears, then, that the microbes must adapt themselves to each new species, and take out in it letters of naturalization, so to speak. So that they may reach the normal virulence in the first inoculation, it is necessary, so to say, to acclimatize them by introducing them, enveloped in a covering of collodion, into the peritoneum of an animal belonging to the species on which one is experimenting. On the other hand, by inoculation from one to another of the same species, bacilli are obtained of a fixed virulence according to the species operated on, so that inoculation causes the death of a guinea-pig in three days or of a mouse in two. If a guinea-pig is inoculated with the bacillus which kills the mouse in two days, the animal does not die until five or sLx days ; a second guinea-pig infected with bacilli from the first dies in less time, and, at the