Experiments on the communicability of cholera to the lower animals / by W. Lauder Lindsay.

  • Lindsay, W. Lauder (William Lauder), 1829-1880.
Date:
1854
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Experiments on the communicability of cholera to the lower animals / by W. Lauder Lindsay. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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

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    occasion to wash ;—and one of the nurses in the same hospi- tal, was more than once seized with very suspicious premoni- tory symptoms on leaving her duties in the wards for a day to wash patients' clothes in the washing-house. Experience has led cholera nurses to believe that by far the most danger- ouspart of cholera patients is their breath and sweat and their clothes, which are more or less saturated therewith. I have read of numerous instances, where the clothes of cholera patients, having been dried, packed up and sent to different parts of the country, were unpacked after the lapse of various considerable periods, with the result of instantly genei'ating or rather propagating the disease in individuals previously healthy, and in places where no cholera had until then oc- curred. From the observation of facts such as these, I was led to believe it extremely probable that by the pulmonary and cutaneous systems the cholera poison is received into and subsequently excreted from the human body ; and a natural deduction from this belief was, that by exposing animals to these supposed poisonous exhalations, i.e., by acting on the skin and lungs, and thereby at once attacking the blood,—and at the same time putting them as much as possible in the same circumstances as the human subject previous to a cholera seizure,—combining ochlesis, damp, filth, poor and innutritions food, deficient ventilation, &c., I was in a manner justified in anticipating some amount of success. By copious dilution with pure air, this noxious effluvium, like all other poisons when diluted, may be compai*atively harmless, even when in- haled ; but, if concentrated in a small space, and an animal of any kind be for a length of time compelled to inspire it, surely it is reasonable to expect that a new focus of disease will speedily be produced. If fomites, I thought, were capable of inducing or exciting the disease in a man previously pre- disposed, why should I not be able, by imitating the circum- stances, which are well known to predispose to cholera in him, by bringing together the localizing causes of the disease, to excite it in the dog ? It is not sufficient to say, that few or no instances exist of the transmission of disease from man to the lower animals, though examples of the propagation of various diseases peculiar to these animals from them to man are far from being uncommon. One great cause of this may be that the subject has never been properly investigated. I cannot help expressing an opinion, that cholera, as an epizootic or as a sporadic disease among certain genera and species of the lower animals—as the result of the same natural influences, whatever these may be, which produce the disease in man,—^is more common than is usually held to be the