The evolution of life / by H. Charlton Bastian.

  • Henry Charlton Bastian
Date:
1907
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: The evolution of life / by H. Charlton Bastian. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by Royal College of Physicians, London. The original may be consulted at Royal College of Physicians, London.

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    gators have testified to much the same mode of origin. No single factor of unwholesomeness at Princetown could be pointed to as having been associated with the observed incidence of the disease; but the clue to an explanation was afforded by a general prevalence of much and marked sore- throat in the district, and by the tender age of the children first attacked. Dr Sweeting says :— There seems, therefore, reason to suspect that diphtheria was evolved amongst young children from previous minor sore-throat in the village, and developed itself in the infants' class at the school; that the disease thus set up was kept going by assemblage of susceptible children at school, and by the further reinforcement of sore-throat when the school was closed ; and [the disease] was spread by infection from person to person at school and elsewhere. Further, in a recent able communication by Dr Hubert Biss on the Borderlands of Diphtheria and Scarlet Fever, written after a large experience in a fever hospital, we find him saying,^ The miances between these conditions — scarlet fever, diphtheria, and tonsillitis—aro so gentle that each shades off into the other not at one but at many points. And quite lately he has reiterated his view that the two diseases, scarlet fever and diphtheria, are to some extent interchangeable. He says,2 But there was no question of theory. The metamorphosis actually took place. Scarlet ' 7he Lancet, 1903, ii- p- 1296. - Brit. Med. Journ., 1906, ii. p. 895.