Variola and vaccinia : their manifestations and inter-relations in the lower animals. An experimental research / by S. Monckton Copeman.

  • Sydney Copeman
Date:
[1893]
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Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Variola and vaccinia : their manifestations and inter-relations in the lower animals. An experimental research / by S. Monckton Copeman. 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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    creased. Experiment shows also that in tubes filled with such diluted lymph opacity does not apparently result. As I have previously stated—an observation, by the way, for which I may fairly claim priority—the glycerine inhibits the growth of, and, after a longer or shorter interval, kills off altogether, those aerobic bacteria which I have termed extraneous. This effect may be demonstrated by making from tubes of glycerinated lymph a series of plate cultiva- tions at gradually increasing intervals of time, together with control cultivations from tubes of untreated lymph. (Photographs of such plates I show you to-night.) With the assistance of Dr. Cobbett I have also carried out a series of glycerine experiments on a larger scale, not only with the organisms which can be grown from vaccine lymph, but also with numerous other species of bacteria, both pathogenic and saprophytic in nature. With details of these expei'iments, which we shall hope to publish shortly, I need not detain you now. I will here merely state that the net outcome of our work appears to show that while some pathogenic organisms remain active in ad- mixtures of broth and glycerine, or even in pure glycerine, for longer or shorter periods, other pathogenic, and, as far as our experiments go, all saprophytic, organisms are killed out in from three or four days to as many weeks. At the time of writing I have seen, for the first time, a paper (dated September 1892) by Achille Sclavo, Director of the Health Bacteriological Laboratory at Rome, on the Preservation of Viruses in Glycerine. In this paper, which is very short, the author does not do much more than just refer to the use of glycerine as an addition to vaccine lymph, and has obviously not altogether appreciated the importance of the results to be derived from such admix- ture. Indeed, he appears to mention it merely as an excep- tion to a rule, which he considers fairly general, that many bacteria are preserved rather than destroyed by glycerine. As, however, he confirms in several particulars the results at which we have arrived, it will be well to briefly epito- mise the paper in question. Glycerine is added nowadays in almost all vaccine institutions to vaccine emulsion, which by this means preserves its virulence for months, and even for years. As a proof of this I adduce the following*:—Dr. Kjrieger, after some experiments with calf lymph, over- looked a bottle of lymph in a press. He found it, and * Note sur le Vaccin de Genisse, par M. E. Deschamps, Heme d^Eygiine, N. S., p. 654.
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