Selected Monographs.

  • New Sydenham Society.
Date:
1888
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Selected Monographs. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by UCL Library Services. The original may be consulted at UCL (University College London)

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    results, with the sole difference of greater amount of pigment, were found in guinea-pigs made to breathe for many hours, in a confined atmosphere, the effluvia from Ostia mud, and in the case of one to breathe like effluvia from decaying grasses collected in August outside the Lateran gate. Parallel to each of these experiments another guinea-pig was kept in an equally confined atmosphere containing no effluvia for a like number of hours. None of the animals, in this counter-experiment, showed any signs of patho- logical disturbances. Each was killed at the same moment as the corresponding animal experimented on, and no trace was found of the alterations met with in those which breathed infected effluvia. Lanzi and Terrigi* have the merit of having used a more rigorous method than any of their predecessors, and of having taken the first step towards the solution of the problem ; and the discovery of black pigment shows that they first succeeded in procuring malarious infection in animals. As, however, they did not examine the splenic swelling, ascertain the proportionate weight of the spleen to the entire body, or make sufficient ther- mometric observations to determine the type of fever, the observations are inadequate. Nor did they ascertain if the black pigment contained iron in inorganic combination, which distin- guishes the melancemic pigment of malaria from other black pigments (melanin). It is therefore uncertain whether the fevers wTere really ma- larious or were produced by septic infection, all the more as the materials used were rich in putrefying organic matter. As regards the nature of malaria, these talented observers have only expressed the opinion that its cause is a cadaveric vegetable poison—a non-living ferment—but they have adduced no proof, direct or indirect, in support of their opinion; they have not isolated the substance and shown that it can generate malaria ; nor were they certain before commencing the experiments that all the organisms were dead. After the meeting of naturalists at Cassel, September, 1878, we undertook the study of this question in the Roman Campagna in the spring of the following year, and one of us (Tommasi- Crudeli) set himself to study and define the foci of malaria in the extent of the Agro Romano in the course of the winter. * PS*™3 Te™B[ 0n Vegetable Miasm, Malaria, and the Climate of Home » Acad. Med., Rome, 1876. '