Volume 1

Final report of the Royal Commission appointed to inquire into the relations of human and animal tuberculosis.

  • Great Britain. Royal Commission on Tuberculosis
Date:
1911
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Final report of the Royal Commission appointed to inquire into the relations of human and animal tuberculosis. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    to inquire whether the milk of a lactating woman, suffering from tuberculosis, might be a possible source of danger to her infant, a question to which conflicting answers have been given by different authorities, but regarding which very few reliable observations appear to have been experimentally made. Such an investigation was not practicable on a large scale, the matter not being one strictly included in the Reference, and pressure of other work together with the difficulty of obtaining suitable cases prevented more than a very few being examined. fut the milk of four nursing women was tested by Dr. A. Stanley Griffith. Briefly it may be stated that each of these women was suffering from pulmonary tuberculosis, though not in an acute form. The diagnosis in each case had been made before the patient was selected, but in only one of the four cases did the woman’s sputum produce tuberculosis when injected into guinea-pigs. The results of the inoculation of guinea-pigs with milk from these women were negative in all the four cases. The details of this investigation are recorded in Vol. I. of the Appendix to this Report (pages 12, 18 and 104-5). The investigation was of course too limited to enable any deductions to be drawn from it. (3) Action of Light-Rays on Lupus Baceilli. Dr. A. Stanley Griffith carried out some preliminary observations with the object of cbtaining information as to how the undoubted benefit caused by treating lupus by light-rays is produced. ‘The experiments were made with lupus tubercle bacilli isolated at Blythwood and grown on artificial media prepared there. The exposures of these cultures to the light-rays were made in the skin department of the London Hospital by permission of Dr. Sequeira and with his co-operation. The results are recorded in Vol. II. of the Appendix to this Report (page 9). They show that the growth of the tubercle bacillus is inhibited by both Finsen and Kromeyer rays, but the limited scope of the investigation did not supply any evidence as to whether this effect is produced by a bactericidal action of the rays on the bacilli or by some modification brought about by the rays in the artificial media or living tissue in which they were growing. INVESTIGATIONS OTHER THAN THOSE AT STANSTED. Two separate investigations, not carried out in the laboratories of the Com- mission, remain to be noted ; both of them were referred to in the Second Interim Report as having been undertaken but at that time unfinished. The results in each case were not sufficiently definite to enable the Commission to make use of them, and neither is referred to in the present final Report. The first was an experimental investigation undertaken by Dr. James Miller, of Birmingham, at the request of the Commission. Various means were being sought at that time to determine any differences that might exist between tubercle bacilli of the human and bovine types apart from their pathogenic effects on cattle and rabbits, and the work entrusted to Dr. Miller was to observe the changes that occurred on bringing living tubercle bacilli obtained from different sources into contact with living cells, and to note if any constant differences could be seen between the interactions of leucocytes with bacilli of these two types. | The cultures of tubercle bacilli with which the investigation was to be carried out were supplied from the Stansted laboratories, but the whole of the experimental work connected with it was done at Birmingham. [Four strains in all were used, three being of bovine and one of human origin; but unfortunately this last virus was subsequently found to be bovine not human in type, and, therefore, no deductions could be drawn from Dr. Miller’s observations as to any contrasts in the cellular reaction induced by different types of tubercle bacillus. But he noted that although practically no difference was observed with regard to either the nature of the cells taking part in the primary reaction or in the amount of this reaction between any of the four viruses, certain minor variations, such as the duration of a period of quiescence, the formation of the giant-cell follicle and the degree of the secondary” inflammatory reaction could be clearly noted in several cases. Thus
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