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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    have been found by the authorities to entail more or less proneness to phthisis. Every writer on consumption has had to deal with the subject, and every layman knows of consumptive and scrophulous families. The fact that certain families have been more subject to the disease than other families is indisputable; and the inference that it was transmitted from parent to offspring was, up to a compara- tively recent period, almost universally considered certain. It was taught that the taint was in the blood. During the last twenty years, however, the view as to the precise rela- tion of heredity to consumption, if it has not completely changed front, has been rapidly turning round, and by the time of Koch's discovery the highest etiological authorities of the English school had come to the conclusion that heredity was not a proximate, but a predisposing, cause of phthisis. Some few writers still held by the ancient dogma of a transmitted taint, but the general opinion was opposed to the supposition that a virus, or sl contagiuvi vivifni^or an entity of any kind, was concerned in entailed phthisis. Nor has the discovery of the bacillus caused any change or modification of this opinion, but has rather tended to con- firm the English school in the conclusion that the large influence heredity has in determining an attack of phthisis is due wholly to the predisposition to the disease acquired , from, or handed down by, the parent. The bulk of the faculty in English-speaking countries reject the theory that ' the bacillus-forms in the lungs of the consumptive are lineal descendants of bacillus-forms in the father or the mother. On the other hand, one section of the Continental school has been moved to its centre by the contcin])latic)n of the bacillus in its relation to heredity, and finds in this relation the strongest proof of the contagious origin of phthisis— although Kocli himself is opposed to the view of true heredity. It is maintained by some that the infected father or mother