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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    between the cases of syphilis and phthisis. In syphilis, the microbe is in the blood from the beginning to the end of its parasitism ; in phthisis, the irruption of the bacillus into the blood is the first scene of the last short act in its career as a parasite in the one host. Hereditary syphilis, there- fore, in addition to its being clearly established, may be readily apprehended ; but hereditary phthisis, in the sense implied, would appear to be a physical impossibility.* Unless there be some occult mode by which a parasitic vegetation living outside the circulating fluids of its animal host is enabled to transmit its specific germens through the walls of vessels into the circulation in such wise that the foetus shall be infected without the blood of the host being contaminated, it is inconceivable how the bacilli con- tained in and confined to the lungs of phthisical parents can be transmitted to their children; or how the bacilli thus transmitted, after a latent period of fifteen or twenty years in some unknown part of the organism, should then leave the organism and re-enter it by way of the air-passages and commence active parasitic life in the alveoli of the lungs. And by how much more is it inconceivable that parents, both of whom have come of a consumptive stock, but have lived and died at a ripe age without having ex- hibited a trace of tuberculosis, should nevertheless have communicated the bacilli of tubercle to their children ? With the English school, however, heredity has fallen from its high estate as a proximate cause down to the sub- ordinate position of a predisposing cause of phthisis. Yet even in this position the influence assigned to it is some- what obscurely manifested and, as I conceive, greatly * I do not overlook the experiments of MM. Landouzy and Martin (Revue de Me'decine, December, 1883), undertaken to show the transmission of the bacillus from the guinea-pig to its foetus. But even if their results were confirmed, their cased of congenital tuberculosis were induced traumatica]ly, whereas I refer to ordinary phthisis beginning in the lung.