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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    importance of light in this connection. Although their observations were confined to liquids, the results of coui'se apply, mutatis mutandis, to low forms of vegetation on solids. As we are not told whether Koch took solar light into account in cultivating tubercle bacilli, either on solids or in liquids, all that need be said here is that, if he did not, the chemical effects of the sun may have been one of the disturbing elements which precluded the gi'owth of the vegetation in his flasks below blood-heat. The tenacity of the vegetative life of the bacillus outside the animal organism—in the cultivation-processes of the micro-pathologist—points significantly to the inference that the form may also have a free existence somewhere in nature. Here we find a so-called pure parasite—an ansero- biotic form—which, when removed from its host, survives under non-natural conditions (on stiffened serum), vegetates serobiotically for months, and yields generation after gene- ration without any sign of diminution of vegetative vitality (if provided with food by transplanting it), or of pathogenic power, so far as traumatic exjDeriments are concerned. Dr. Watson Cheyne [op. cit.'] says, The serum in the tubes may be allowed to dry up, as occurred in one of my tubes, but still the bacilli grow when transferred to fresh serum, and produce tuberculosis when inoculated into an animal. The fact that a form of this kind, the spore-development of which, as Koch states, takes place within the animal body, and not outside it, clings to life in this marvellous way on dried-up jelly, and then starts again into active growth when transferred to fresh serum (without any spores to carry it on, be it observed, and solely by vegetative pro- cesses), shows that this parasite has, at all events, a great facility in ada})ting itself to decidedly foreign, and appa- rently adverse, conditions. And although little enough is known of this class of vegetation, this behaviour of the