The origin of contagia : in relation to prevailing theoretic views and scientific applications / by A.M. Brown.

  • Brown, A. M. (Alexander Menzies)
Date:
1884
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: The origin of contagia : in relation to prevailing theoretic views and scientific applications / by A.M. Brown. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by The Royal College of Surgeons of England. The original may be consulted at The Royal College of Surgeons of England.

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    The first is contrary to reason and impartial observation, the second becomes more positive as experimental science becomes more exact. Thanks both to observation and experiment, half-a-century has wrought a total revolution in our notions regarding organic being. From the protophyta and protozoa of the microscopic world to the higher series of the lower orders of the botanical and zoological divisions, as we see them by unaided vision, the laws and modes of development and transformation receive the closest study. From Lamarck to Darwin; Ehrenberg, Muller, Milne—Edwards, Perrier, Trembley, and a thousand others have enriched this branch of natural science by their labours, confirmed its principles, and made the evidence of its facts familiar. Why not apply the theory to the pathology, which deals with the same materials, though in a morbid aspect ? It would be both interesting and instructive to definitely trace the metamorphosis of those micro-germs which some believe to constitute the essential elements of much disease, and which lie at the root of every theory or hypothesis, etiological and prophylactic, in medicine, and even in surgery. But in studying germs, we must not expect to meet with transmissible malignant fevers without their filth or famine any more than naturalists would fish without their water. VI. Judging from all such data at command, are Pangermists justified in maintaining that the the germs of contagia, infectious or inocula- tive, must result, and always have resulted, from pre-existing germs ? Or, admitting that they were created at a certain epoch, can they reasonably conceive the possibility of their arising otherwise than from organized material, free from germs potentially efficient ? And, supposing the event to have taken place in accordance with the necessary determining conditions, may it not constantly renew itself on the recurrence of these same conditions ? At variance with the opinion now generally entertained, Professor Pinxas, of Berlin, recently assured us, from investigation of the con- stituents of the vaccine vesicle, he had ascertained the fact that the material which produces the bacterides develops itself in the system of the subject vaccinated, and not in the lymph when normal. This is still disputed. But whether that virus has its distinctive microzyme