The history of infection / by Arnold C. Klebs.

  • Arnold Klebs
Date:
[1917]
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: The history of infection / by Arnold C. Klebs. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    2/16 page 159
    OT only among the Greeks and Romans who still are our princi- pal schoolmasters, but long be- fore them there existed im human language a term to designate the process of infection. It did not always have exactly the same significance which it now has. Tradi- tion preserved for it a certain basic mean- ing; and convention, according to varying necessities and changing interests, modified its application. This 1s only the natural vari- ation to which all terms are subject and one of the reasons why it is so difficult for us to enter into the thoughts and activities of former generations and fully profit by their experiences. When the Roman used the verb “infi- cere” it conveyed to him not only the Iit- eral sense of putting one thing mto another, but with the qualification that the “in- fected” object is altered m appearance or effect and chiefly so as to render it unpleas- ing, harmful or corrupted.? Now, this cor- responds in general to our own use of the word and indeed one might think that we chose it for that very reason, making it only more precise and limited. As a matter of fact we had no choice. The term came down to us gradually through all the mn- tervening generations, even preserving Its Latin form. It is evidently the importance of the underlying idea which it expresses 1 Subject of an address delivered before the Bio- logical Club of the University of Chicago and the Historical Society of Washington University, St. Louis, in December, 1916. 2The adjective and noun (infectus and infectio) had more the sense of our “ineffective,” while “in- fectivus,” at least in Vitruvius, is the thing altered, infected, particularly dyed or colored. intelligibly that has preserved it, and this idea is neither Roman nor Greek, but sim- ply human. It offers an appropriate word- picture for something of daily incidence and vital importance. It relates the cause with the effect and thus becomes the word- symbol of a primitive etiologic concept. Words of this kind have a much greater vitality than the more artificial nomencla- ture of philosophy and science. Since we have become acquainted with microorganisms and their réle in diseases, etiologic research, because of its tangible object, has exerted a determining influence on medicine. It has gone almost to the ex- treme of making etiology and bacteriology synonymous terms. Infection to-day means, if we take it m the broad definition of Hek- toen, “the entrance into the body of living agents, capable of multiplication, most commonly microbes, which then cause dis- ease.” ‘The microorganism as the deter- mining factor of infectious diseases, the specificness of the infection and the invari- ability of microbic species make this the dominant theory of the day mm medicine. Its profound influence is felt in private and public life to a degree unparalleled in the annals of human society. So dominant is this doctrine that the question is hardly ever asked: might there not be, apart from the microbe, pathogenic influences of equal if not of greater importance? Even those who vindicate for modern scientific research its freedom from dogma (Hamilton) adhere to the all-importance of the living agent im the causation of disease. The others, the followers of Koch, whose labors, they say, have brought the question to “‘a certain and unequivocal conclusion,”
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