Post-graduate course at Queen's College, Birmingham : two lectures on the general pathology of tubercle, with especial reference to the question of infection / by Gilbert Barling.

  • Barling, Harry Gilbert, 1855-1940.
Date:
[1891]
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Post-graduate course at Queen's College, Birmingham : two lectures on the general pathology of tubercle, with especial reference to the question of infection / by Gilbert Barling. 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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    third, and fourth were, so far as is known, healthy at the time of purchase, and had not been exposed previously to infection. Further, the schoolmaster's stables were well kept, and the cows properly looked after. An experiment of Koch's shews the possibility of guinea-pigs infecting one another in the way we are now discussing. He selected a number of healthy guinea-pigs. Some of them he infected with tubercle by inoculation, and then shut up with them in the same stable a number of the animals perfectly healthy and not inoculated. The result was that in three or four months' time. these healthy animals became tuberculous, and post mortem examination shewed clearly that the disease had commenced in the lungs, and the only possible inference was that the disease started from bacilli inhaled from the destruction of tubercular lesions in the inoculated animals. The cases and experiments I have quoted at least suggest the possibility of infection by the respiratory passages. But you may naturally enquire what evidence is there that tubercle bacilli are to be found in the atmosphere, and further whether they are still virulent? First of all as to the virulence. If animals be inoculated with tubercular sputum containing bacilli, even if it has been dried for weeks, tuberculosis is produced. As long as the sputum remains moist, the bacilli are of course kept out of the atmosphere, but when a phthisical person of dirty habits expectorates about a room or in the streets, things are different. The expectoration then dries up and becomes distributed in tiny particles, which contain bacilli, on the furni- ture, carpets, or any other objects, where they can be discovered by proper methods of examination. Dr. Cornet's experiments on this point are most positive. He proceeded as follows :—With perfectly sterile sponges he washed the walls or floor of a room, or the furniture, or whatever he wished to examine. From these sponges he inoculated broth, such as tubercle bacilli could grow upon, and if when this broth was injected into guinea-pigs they shewed symptoms of tuber- culosis, he concluded that tubercle bacilli were present in the
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