Fragments of science : a series of detached essays, addresses, and reviews / by John Tyndall.

  • John Tyndall
Date:
1876
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Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Fragments of science : a series of detached essays, addresses, and reviews / by John Tyndall. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    diseased intestine.' Hence the mystic power of ' sewer-gas ' • Hence the inability of the metropolitan practitioner to trace the disease to its origin. Hence the immunity of undrained country villages as long as the specific poison keeps away ; and hence also the localised ravages of the disease in such villages as soon as it appears. Were it not that I have already drawn far too heavily upon your space, I might enlarge upon these subjects. I will limit myself to one more point of commanding interest. What is the nature of the typhoid poison? The 'yellow typhoid matter,' already referred to, Budd describes as made up of nucleated cells. The term ' germ-theory ' does not, to my knowledge, occur once in the volume, possibly because of the opposition and ridicule ' which that theory encountered in the English Medical Press. Over and over again Budd speaks of ' germs; ' but it might be imagined that he used the word figuratively. Those who knew him, however, were well aware that this Avas not the case; and in the early part of the present volume, after describ- ing the calamities incident to typhoid fever, he remarks: 'It is humiliating that issues such as these should be contingent on the powers of an agent so low in the scale of being that the mildew which springs on decaying wood must be considered high in comparison.' Four or five years ago, I, an outsider, ventured upon this ground of medical theory, for it involved no knowledge of medical practice, but simply a capacity to weigh evidence ; and the evidence that epidemic diseases were parasitic . appeared to me very strong. On June 9, 1871, I ventured to express myself thus: ' With their respective viruses you may plant typhoid fever, scarlatina, or smallpox. What are the crops that arise from this husbandry? As surely as a thistle rises from a thistle-seed, as surely as the fig comes from the fig, the grape from the grape, and the thorn from the thorn, so surely does the typhoid virus increase and multiply into typhoid fever, the scarlatina virus into scarlatina, the smallpox virus into smallpox. What is the conclusion that suggests itself here ? It is this: that the thing which we vaguely call a virus is to all intents and purposes a seecZ; that, excluding the notion of vitality, in the whole range of chemical science you cannot point Now considerably abated [1876].