The prevention of consumption : a mode of prevention founded on a new theory of the nature of the tubercle-bacillus / by C. Candler.

  • Candler, C.
Date:
1887
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: The prevention of consumption : a mode of prevention founded on a new theory of the nature of the tubercle-bacillus / by C. Candler. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by the Francis A. Countway Library of Medicine, through the Medical Heritage Library. The original may be consulted at the Francis A. Countway Library of Medicine, Harvard Medical School.

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    forms, or, if really met with as described, were accidentally present and were perfectly harmless; at all events, there was no sufficient proof of their noxiousness. Language very like this is to be found in their works and periodicals long after the investigations of Pasteur, Obermeier, and Koch; and though their tone of contempt and incredulity is modified to some extent, yet even recently one of the greatest of mycologists, in a work of profound research in some branches of mycology, could not resist a fling at the imperfect biological and botanical work of the micro-patho- logist. In short, botanists strenuously resisted the views of pathologists as long as they decently could, and then gave them a reluctant half-hearted recognition, and from first to last have left them to be worked out without special aid on their parts. At all events, we have not seen that any botanist has studied the life-cycles of Pasteur's microbes, of the Sj)irillmii Obenneieri, of the Bacillus anthracis, of the B. tuberculosis, or of any other human pathophyte, in order to ascertain whether all or any of these forms are pure parasites or not; and if not, to connect them with their parent-forms, and to trace them to their ordinary matrices in nature. It is both extraordinary and unfortunate that botanists, of all men, should not have had the penetration to perceive that, underlying the mass of botanical and biological rubbish heaped up on this subject, were potential germs of truth. For there was nothing in the view that vegetable parasites cause zymotic disease that was repugnant to what was known of parasitism. It had long been shown that insects of many kinds were attacked and killed by vegetable parasites, and that man himself was attacked by unmis- takal)]e forms of vegetation—notably in his skin. AVliat, tliercfore, was there so preposterous in the notion that vegetation should invade the animal organism and cause