The antiquity of disease / by Roy L. Moodie.

  • Roy Lee Moodie
Date:
[1923]
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: The antiquity of disease / by Roy L. Moodie. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    33/174 page 13
    The earliest form which pathological processes took, aside from those of a traumatic nature, were parasitic. Parasitism, preceded by mild forms of communism and commensalism, is known to be very ancient and to this influence, doubtless, the first forms of disease were due. Parasitic evidences have been described as old as the Devonian, and traumatic evidences are known as old as the Ordovician. Doubtless, close search would reveal other interesting evidences among the older forms of life, even as far back as the evidences of life itself, unless, as suggested elsewhere, infectious diseases were warded off by the great natural immunity which only broke down after ages of evolution, accompanied by racial degener- escence. The part played by bacteria—and it is now well known that bacteria are very ancient—is still largely speculative. The pre-Cambrian bacteria so far known are supposed to have had an activity allied to that described by Drew for Bacterium calcis and other marine calcium-precipitat¬ ing bacteria. Doubt has even been expressed as to whether the small bodies seen in the algal shales are really bacteria. The results of infection by bacteria are not definitely known prior to the Permian. Bacteria and fungi, possibly, however, chiefly those of decay, are widely distributed and well known from the Carboniferous rocks. Here lies a wide field of research, although a difficult one, dealing with the origin of that type of disease which is so troublesome to humanity today. It seems probable from present evidences that a wide distribution of the bacterial types of disease and the resulting pathol¬ ogy is a relatively recent phenomenon, with an antiquity
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