Bacteriological and clinical studies of the diarrheal diseases of infancy with reference to the Bacillus dysenteriae (Shiga) : from the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research / edited by Simon Flexner and L. Emmett Holt.

Date:
1904
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Bacteriological and clinical studies of the diarrheal diseases of infancy with reference to the Bacillus dysenteriae (Shiga) : from the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research / edited by Simon Flexner and L. Emmett Holt. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    The fact that two of these three positive cases are the only ones in which an inflammatory intestinal lesion was found, is of interest in this connection. In the case C., the dysentery infection was a ter- minal one occurring about five days before death. (One positive dysentery case was in the hospital at the time. ) Case H. was in the hospital but thirty-six hours before her death, had had green and frequent stools for one month before admission, and probably entered the hospital with a dysenteric infection of a mild degree. This seems a more rational explanation than the as- sumption that she acquired the infection during her short stay in the hospital, when no other positive case was present in her ward. I’. had had “bad” stools for two months before admission, but had recovered from them; and throughout three weeks of her stay the stools numbered from one to three daily, and were well digested and smooth. This was probably one of the cases in which the bacilli remained latent in the intestinal mucosa after recovery from an attack of dysenteric infection. Bacteriological examination: Case F.—In the plates poured from the rectal scrapings, two non-gas-producing organisms were found to be non-motile bacilli which grew in the fermentation tubes with- out forming gas, in glucose, saccharose, lactose or mannit broth. Lit- mus-milk became slightly pink in twenty-four hours, but never coagu- lated; the blue color (like control) was restored on the fourth day. Acid was produced in mannit, maltose, dextrine and lactose peptone agar made without meat. Saccharose remained unchanged. The ag- glutination reactions were slow in appearance. Thus in two hours, in dilutions of 1-50, agglutination began, and in sixteen to twenty hours it was complete in dilutions of 1-1000; negative in I-1500. For the serum with which the agglutination reactions were made I am indebted to Dr. Park. It is that of a horse immunized with mixed cultures of the Shiga, the Flexner-Manila and the New York City (type A, mannit-fermenting) dysentery bacilli. Five c.c. of a forty-eight-hour bouillon culture injected into the peri- toneal cavity of a medium-sized guinea-pig resulted in death within twenty-four hours. From the bloody serum in the peritoneal cavity the bacillus was recovered in pure culture. A rabbit treated with dead cultures has now reached the point where its serum reacts to the bacillus in dilutions of 1-2000, having been negative in 1-10 before the injections began. The Shiga type of B. dysenteriz fails to react with the rabbit’s serum in dilutions of