On the transmission of diseases between man and the lower animals / by W. Lauder Lindsay.

  • Lindsay, W. Lauder (William Lauder), 1829-1880.
Date:
1858
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: On the transmission of diseases between man and the lower animals / by W. Lauder Lindsay. 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.

    17/22 (page 15)
    and others, in regard to the better supplying of our markets with healthy butcher meat. These gentlemen have shown that the flesh of animals, which have died of all manner of diseases, finds its way regularly into our markets—partly, no doubt, from ignorance of veterinary pathology on the part of the inspectors of these markets; and Mr Gant has pointed out how fatty degeneration, w^e?' alia, results from the absurd prize fattening system. Prop. 10. The department of pathology is, perhaps, that in which our veterinary practitioners are most deficient. The records of many epizootics and rare sporadic diseases have frequently been rendered worthless by the absence of pathological details. The Registrar-General of Deaths, &c., in a quarterly report about the beginning of 1857, remarks: The pathology of domestic animals is exceedingly imperfect; their diseases are badly characterised; and the effect of epizootic causes on the human race is little understood.^ This is a most true and most suggestive sentence. There are few more important studies to the young veterinarian than this ; few likely to be more pregnant of advantage to science; few more certain to gather laurels for himself. Prop. 11. I am daily more and more convinced of the important results likely to accrue from experimentation on the lower animals, in regard to our knowledge of such diseases as cholera, syphilis, small-pox, erysipelas, dysentery, &c.; and it is not a little encourag- ing to find my views shared in by Dr Richardson of London, who has recently earned for himself an early, but solid and enviable fame, by his admirable series of experiments on the Cause of the Coagulation of the Blood.' In his paper at the Epidemiological Society, he specially recommends experiments in scarlatina, small- pox, and typhus; he narrates experiments of his own, in which he succeeded in producing all the characters of typhus by introducing alkalies into the blood; and he shows also that a typhus state may be produced by the injection into the system of putrid animal mat- ters. He deplores, as deeply as I do, the present unsatisfactory and unscientific character of the study of epidemiology; and he believes experimentation on the lower animals to be one of the most likely means of improving our knowledge of epidemics. He suggests, as subjects for investigation, the following points, which he puts in the form of propositions:— 1. That, by experiment, it might be ascertained in what excreta the poisons of certain of the epidemic diseases are located. 2. By what surfaces of the body such poisons may be absorbed, so as to produce their specific effects. 3. Whether the virus of disease, in reproducing its disease in a healthy body, acts in the development of the phenomena by which the disease is typified, primarily or secondarily, i. e., by its own re- ^ Quoted in a Letter from Mr Joseph S. Gamgek on Quarnntinn and the Contagious Typhus of Cattle, in Lancet, May 16, 1857.