A treatise on the continued fevers of Great Britain.

  • Charles Murchison
Date:
1884
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: A treatise on the continued fevers of Great Britain. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by the Augustus C. Long Health Sciences Library at Columbia University and Columbia University Libraries/Information Services, through the Medical Heritage Library. The original may be consulted at the the Augustus C. Long Health Sciences Library at Columbia University and Columbia University.

    38/814 (page 12)
    For these reasons, and for others to be advanced hereafter, it appears to me that there are good grounds for beheving that contagious fevers have occasionally an independent origin. The real difficulty consists in reconciling this view with the facts that their poisons can retain their power for a lengthened time, and under favourable circumstances become indefinitely multi- plied. These properties cannot be satisfactorily explained on any physical or chemical theory; but they do not negative a generation de novo of the poison. The recent researches of Beale,J Chauveau,^ and Sanderson,^ have gone far to prove that the virulence of contagious liquids is due to the presence of minute solid particles of organic matter derived from the human organism, and these particles are probably the degraded offspring of some kind of normal living matter, incapable of returning to its previous healthy state, but capable of being developed de novo in persons or animals living under conditions adverse to health. There is no proof that these particles are endowed with the power of self-multiplication, but, like a tubercle or pus-corpuscle, they can excite by contact a fresh formation of similar particles in the human body.™ This view appears to offer the best ex- planation of all the facts of the case; and, if it be correct, the various pests to which man is subject are of animal origin, and ought by human energy and intelligence to be extirpated. [Since this statement of Dr. Murcliison's \dews on the nature of contagion the discovery of the microbes of relapsing fever, anthrax, fowl cholera, hog typhoid, and probably those of malaria, tubercle, and other specific diseases, together with the results of inoculation and cultivation experiments, has afforded fresh support to the notion that contagious fevers are due to parasitic organisms, and this must now be regarded as, in all probabihty, the correct view of their nature. But this view by no means disproves the possibility of their arising de novo, apart from the theory of spontaneous degeneration which few would be inchned to accept. For the researches of Pasteur and others have shown that the properties of these organisms may be modified in an extraordinary degree by placing them under different conditions ; hence it is quite conceivable that the germs of a disease like typhoid or typhus fever might under ordinary circumstances be harmless, and only acquire virulent properties when under the uofluence of pent up stagnating sewage, or overcrowding and imperfect ventilation, in the same mamier as the bacillus of anthrax may be rendered more or less virulent by being cultivated with the access of more or less oxygen.] J Beale, 1865 and 1871. * Comptes rendus, 1S68, LXVIII. p. 289. ' Sanderson, 1870. ■ On this see Bastian, 1872. ° Pasteue, 1881,