On the so-called malignant pustule of external anthrax / by J.T.J. Morrison.

  • Morrison, James Thomas Jackman, 1856-1933.
Date:
[1887]
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: On the so-called malignant pustule of external anthrax / by J.T.J. Morrison. 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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    bactcridia in a single drop of blood at about ten millions ; he was able to produce the disease with the millionth dilution of such a drop. He further alleged that bacteridia were invariably present in anthrax, and that with their disappearance the blood ceased to be infectious. These observations served as a new point of departure in the study of bacteria, and, owing chiefly to the researches of Ehrenberg and Nageli, supplemented by those of Cohn, con- siderable light has been thrown upon the life-history of vegetable parasites, particularly of the family to which the anthrax bacillus belongs, namely, Schizomycetes or Bacteria, asub-division of the Fungi. It is to Cohn that we are indebted for the term bacillus anthracis, to which Davaine’s older name bacteridium has everywhere given place. The value of Davaine’s work, however, has been lasting, and his propositions have been substantially confirmed by trustworthy researchers, as Bollinger and Koch in Germany, Toussaint and Pasteur in France, Klein and Greenfield in England. Our own country has been conspicuously absent from the earlier part of the narrative. Nor is this surprising, for whereas anthrax is enzootic throughout the pastoral regions of continental Europe, Great Britain is strikingly excepted. It hence follows that our knowledge of the disease is chiefly derived from French and German writers. In England the malady appears to have been first observed about 1840 among the woolsorters at Bradford, where it has been ever since endemic, and has acquired the name of “woolsorters’ disease.” The history of the disease in its connection with Bradford claims a brief notice. According to Dr. Bell, alpaca and mohair were introduced into the district as textile materials about 1837, and the appearance of the disease is popularly supposed to date from this time. Occasional suspicious deaths occurred amongst the wool- sorters without attracting much notice; but when, as sometimes happened, several men working in the same room died within a short time of one another, the sorters would become alarmed. Years of increased fatality were 1846, 1854, 1867 and 1876.