Atlas of venereal diseases / by A. Cullerier ; translated from the French, with notes and additions, by Freeman J. Bumstead.
- Bumstead Freeman J. (Freeman Josiah), 1826-1879.
- Date:
- 1868
Licence: Public Domain Mark
Credit: Atlas of venereal diseases / by A. Cullerier ; translated from the French, with notes and additions, by Freeman J. Bumstead. Source: Wellcome Collection.
Provider: This material has been provided by the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh. The original may be consulted at the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh.
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![Clerc (Traits des Mai Ven., p. 214): Without wish- ing to defenfl, and still less to excuse, the abuse of in- oculation, we assert that this practice, introduced by Hunter, continued and extended by Eicord, has ren- dered and will still render to science, and consequently to humanity, services so great, that it should be re- garded as an indispensable light to him who would know syphilis or who would devote himself to this branch of pathology. A valuable suggestion, which I have followed with much satisfaction, was, I believe, original with M. Clerc, viz.: to make the inoculations with a pin instead of a lancet, and to penetrate the skin no deeper than the surface of its vascular layer. The advantages are these : a new pin is readily obtainable, no question can arise in its use with regard to the cleanliness of the instrument employed, and patients are not alarmed by it; again, the wound made by it is not likely to be deep, and there is reason to believe that the unpleasant consequences from phagedena which have occasionally followed artificial inoculation have been due to the deep insertion of the virus with a lancet.—F. J. £.] Inoculations of healthy subjects, although infinitely more restricted in number, have rendered eminent ser- vice because they were more logical; but in order to practise them, a certain courage was needful which every- body did not possess, and there were humanitary con- siderations before which many experimenters recoiled. Hunter was the first to inoculate himself with gon- orrhoeal matter from one of his patients, a vain experi- ment which led to erroneous inferences ; but it was no longer vain when Wallace, Waller, Rinecker, the anony- mous writer of the Palatinate, and more recently Vidal (de Cassis), Melchior Robert, M. Gibert and others, ventured to inoculate with the syphilitic virus, and thus demonstrated the contagion of secondary symp- toms; and, finally, we have the remarkable experiments of Pellizari (of Florence), since which it has been quite impossible to deny the virulence of the blood. If inoculation of a healthy subject has only confirmed what observation had taught, thei'e is at least one fact which it has put in bold relief: it is the long incuba- tion which separates the moment of contagion from that of the appearance of the local manifestation, for the appreciation of which the physician had heretofore been at the discretion of his patient. The hope has been repeatedly entertained of finding a free field for experiments by trying them on animals. This was practised a century ago by Turnbull and Hunter, then by my father, and in our days by Ricord, Puche, and de Castelnau. Thus far the results had been only negative; but about fifteen years ago it was resumed, and, as was pretended, with success. At this epoch I commenced myself a number of experiments, which I varied infinitely on five kinds of animals — the dog, the cat, the rabbit, the cabiai, and the monkey; and I never succeeded, whatever morbid secretion I used. Trustworthy observers, however,— such as Mel- chior Robert, Dr. Robert de Weltz, and M. Diday, — have retaken from an animal the pus of an inoculated soft chancre, and applied it to themselves, and have seen a soft chancre develop itself at the point inoculated. My own opinion is, for all that, that these cases are only examples of mediate contagion; the virulent pus having been deposited on the skin of an animal, as it might have been on an inert body, it has been trans- ferred, retaining all its power, to a healthy organism. A soft chancre has never been seen in progress on any animal, nor purulent adenitis, so frequent an at- tendant on this kind of chancre. Thus, as I observed in a paper published sixteen years ago in the Trans- actions of the Chirurgical Society : There can be no true inoculation of a soft chancre from a man to a monkey, or to any animal whatever, until a suppurating ulceration has been produced, which, after being washed repeatedly to free it from the pus originally deposited there, will yet furnish a secretion which may be trans- ferred to another part of the animal itself, or to man. Until then, I cannot possibly see anything else than the deposit of chancrous matter producing suppurative inflammation, this product having acted as an irritant, but as an irritant merely. Inoculation of the hard chancre, or of the secretion from secondary symptoms, has had no better result. No specific induration, no indolent ganglia, nothing upon the integument. At the time I made my experi- ments, a monkey, on which numerous inoculations had been made by another surgeon, died; and some persons fancied they recognized on his skin a syphilitic exan- thema ; but it was impossible to find the least distinc- tive character, even an inflammatory one, in the marks of extravasation, which were owing to post-mortem](https://iiif.wellcomecollection.org/image/b21691630_0021.jp2/full/800%2C/0/default.jpg)
