The history of infection / by Arnold C. Klebs.

  • Arnold Klebs
Date:
[1917]
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: The history of infection / by Arnold C. Klebs. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    14/16 page 171
    time providing sanitary legislation, quar- antine measures and disinfection against various diseases and especially plague, lep- rosy and phthisis, can fail to see how much all this is based on the fundamental con- cept of mfection. Imperfect as are all hu- man institutions these measures were often excessive and unnecessarily severe. Because of this mherent defect, which our own measures share, they hardly merited being held up to ridicule by Koehler at the Inter- national Conference on Sanitary Legisla- tion in 1897. It is characteristic of the pre- vailing historical shallowness that he cited the medieval decrees against cholera, a dis- ease which first appeared in Europe only 100 years ago.” Many instances might be cited to show how often the lay mind, grasping a funda- mental principle, drew imstinctively and spontaneously the necessary consequences and it is somewhat depressing to have to acknowledge that so very often this oc- curred without the aid of the scientist and sometimes against his protests. But only the recognition of the fact can mdicate the road to improvement. I shall not try to cite many instances but I cannot refrain from alluding to that Jast event in the history of infection, sufficiently remote to permit crit- ical analysis, which shows the extraordinary viability of the primordial concept and its application. I mean the great experiment of prophylactic variolation during the period of from 1721 to 1840. It is almost forgotten over vaccination although neither the one nor the other owed its origin to scientific medi- cine. I shall merely repeat what I said be- fore about the work of Angelo Gatti in which he gave expression to the thoughts underlying the movement, against the op- position of the Medical Faculty of Paris: First he discusses the etiology of smallpox and turns sharply against such futile terms as “fermentation, leven, humores, ebulli- 22 See G. Sticker in Heft 2, Zur historischen Biologie tion, effervescence, germ, etc.” On the meaninglessness of such terms a mass of physicians base their therapeutic proce- dures; they use them even in such cases where a Sydenham or Boerhaave would have been content to observe and describe. For Gatti variola is produced by a foreign body that has entered the organism from without. Transmission takes place by con- tact, or through the organs of respiration or digestion. The “virus” reproduces and mul- tiplies itself. Smallpox is the constant and definite effect of it, strictly specific. Vario- lation is the transmission of the disease controlled by mtelligence instead of acci- dent. For the purpose of inoculation the virus must be modified. Gatti’s purposeful attempts at attenuation might still be read with profit by modern experimenters.*° CONCLUSIONS We are too near our own time to form a broad judgment of our methods and con- cepts. When we review the many fertile applications made by microorganic biology mn every-day life, the advances of a pur- poseful prophylaxis and of sanitary sciences generally, to doubt the correctness and utility of these efforts would require a hy- percritical and entirely objectionable atti- tude of mind. And also as regards our mod- ern methods of laboratory investigation, we must agree with Welch, when he said here at the University of Chicago in 1907, that “‘we cannot foresee a time when pure- ly observational and descriptive biological studies, which to-day hold the first place, shall not continue to have their value.’’*! It is probably better in the interest of our aims that we should rather over- than 30 A.C. Klebs, Heft 7. Hist. Biologie d. Krankheits- erreger. Giessen, 1914, also The historic evolution of variolation, Jobns Hopkins Hosp. Bull., 1913, xxiv, 69. 31 Welch: The Interdependence of medicine and
    digitised image 1
    digitised image 2
    digitised image 3