Dr. Walter Robert Hadwen's works.

  • Walter Hadwen
Date:
1896-1908
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: Dr. Walter Robert Hadwen's works. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine Library & Archives Service. The original may be consulted at London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine Library & Archives Service.

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    [From The Daily Mail, September 22.] SIR VICTOR HORSLEY. To the Editor of The Daily Mail. Now for Dr. Had wen and his alternate assumptions ot ignorance and omniscience. In his first letter he professed himself ignorant of the existence of any scientific demonstration that any disease is ever due to a parasite or germ. To this I replied by quoting the ordinary text-book postulates of Koch, which are known to and accepted by the whole scientific world, and have resulted, as I stated in my last letter, in many brilliant discoveries of such germs. Pasteur and Koch. In his second letter he admits, without the slightest apology to your readers, that he knew of this universally accepted scientific demonstration even while suggesting to your readers that ijo such method existed. I must confess that it does not appear to me just that my time or that of any other busy man should be wasted in discussion with a contestant of this character, but I cannot pass by his wholesale travesty of bac- teriological methods and allow him to mislead your readers by a confused statement on a complex subject like diphtheria. Let us begin at the beginning. Koch's first great work was the elaboration of the life history of the parasite or germ of anthrax—viz., the bacillus anthracis. W. R. Hadwen, M.D., stands alone in the world in professing to believe, as he tells your readers he does, that the bacillus is not the cause of the virulent disease anthrax, but only one of its results. If Dr. Hadwen will inject a syringeful of the anthrax bacillus into one of his veins he will soon be impressed by the scientific truth of Koch's postulates, and that his fatal illness is a result of which the bacillus
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