The origin of zymotic diseases / by F.A. Cooper.

  • Cooper, F.A.
Date:
[1897?]
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: The origin of zymotic diseases / by F.A. Cooper. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by The Royal College of Surgeons of England. The original may be consulted at The Royal College of Surgeons of England.

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    of not being a matter of common remark, seems to me to be tlie same as for cholera, and if it should be so we shall have two reversions from the same insect, or, possibly, varieties of the same insect, unless we look upon this as a mild form of cholera. Now, with regard to the germ develojped from the egg. In, for instance, the case of typhoid its specific origin from the egg can scarcely be doubted, but that still leaves open the question, What is the germ arising from it ? Clearly it is not the ordinary larva, one-sixth of an inch in length, a vegetable feeder, and the free embryo of a single insect; nor do I see how it can any longer be classed, as it is at the present time by bacteriologists, as a member of the vegetable kingdom, especially when the origin of the classification is examined, for it all arose out of the mis- leading analogy made by Pasteur, who, when he had completed his classical researches on Yeast—unquestionably a member of the vegetable kingdom—and commenced his still more famous researches on Disease Germs, erroneously assumed they were all of equally vegetable origin. Analogy is always the flimsiest kind of reasoning, never more than a sign pointing in a certain direction, without any further reason for assuming it to be the right one; yet on this mere ghost of a reason there has been set up an artificial classification (i.c., a non-natural one, not based on organisation or functional action), and the whole of the “ Bacteria ” shelved wholesale into a class between the Fungi and the Alga-. All 1 am here concerned with is to siiow that the germs of Zymotic Disease have been so placed