The asceptic treatment of wounds / Tr. from the 2d German ed. by Alfred Theodore Rake.

  • Schimmelbusch, Curt, 1860-1895.
Date:
1894
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: The asceptic treatment of wounds / Tr. from the 2d German ed. by Alfred Theodore Rake. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by the Augustus C. Long Health Sciences Library at Columbia University and Columbia University Libraries/Information Services, through the Medical Heritage Library. The original may be consulted at the the Augustus C. Long Health Sciences Library at Columbia University and Columbia University.

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    bacillus, the most resistant known to us, and gave orders for our instruments to be boiled or steamed for hours, we should be holding up an ideal, that of exter- minating every kind of germ, which would be quite un- attainable in ordinary practice. But these fungi are of absolutely no pathological significance for men ; and it must be laid down as an axiom once for all, that our measures for disinfection need not be directed against organisms that have no pernicious effect on wounds. In veterinary pathology disease germs are met with which have extraordinary powers of resistance. The spores of symptomatic anthrax, popularly known as quarter evil, and of malignant oedema are far more resistant than those of anthrax. It is possible, though not positively proved, that both these diseases may also attack men ; and it is quite conceivable that organisms with similar powers of resistance may be found to account for certain peculiar and severe inflammatory processes ending in gangrene, which now and again occur in men, and have not yet been explained by bac- teriology. In dealing with them we can devise mea- sures of greater disinfecting energy, and all objects which come in contact with the suspicious virus, can be sterilized more carefully than at other times. A further distinction, which stands out all the more clearly in clinical experience, from the fact that in the prompt results of laboratory experiments it seems to dis- appear, is the distinction between germs that are patho- genic but not infectious, and those which are infectious as well. It does not necessarily follow because a disease is caused by a fission-fungus, and its germs are inocu- lated without failure from one animal to another, that the disease is therefore directly contagious. One of the most terrible diseases, noma, popularly known in Ger-