On slight ailments : and on treating disease / by Lionel S. Beale.
- Lionel Smith Beale
- Date:
- MDCCCXC [1890]
Licence: Public Domain Mark
Credit: On slight ailments : and on treating disease / by Lionel S. Beale. Source: Wellcome Collection.
Provider: This material has been provided by King’s College London. The original may be consulted at King’s College London.
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![BACTERIA SWALLOWED BY ALL ANIMALS. stroyed during digestion by the action of the gastric juice and bile, and other fluids, which are poured into the alimentary canal. Those that are not destroyed certainly do no harm. In the healthy state they either do not grow and multiply at all during digestion and assimilation, ■or only to a very slight extent. In the case of animals the introduction into the stomach of fungi of very many species and other low organisms in countless numbers constantly proceeds upon an enormous scale. Every mouthful of water consumed by sheep, oxen, and other animals constantly teems with myriads of low vegetable and animal organisms in various stages of development; and in the food taken bacteria and many species of fungi in various stages of development are present, as well as the sporules of many different species. But although millions of living fungi are always entering the alimentary canal of man and animals without doing harm, and probably without growing and multiplying there to any great extent, there are circumstances under which a different state of things is met with. If the stomach is out of order, if the bile and other secretions are deranged, or if from some temporary or permanent impediment to their passage they are not poured into the alimentary canal in proper quantity, phenomena totally unlike those characteristic of the healthy state are induced. Many an infant has suffered from the extraordinary development of bacteria in its alimentary canal, and some children die from the state of things thereby induced. But the bacteria cannot correctly be regarded as the cause of the departure from the normal state. That is to be sought in the secretions and in the action of the glands prior to the multiplication of the organisms. I have seen every part of the cavity of the stomach, and of the small and large intestines of an infant filled with curdled milk which had not undergone the slightest digestion, and every particle of which, when under the microscope, almost seemed to be composed of bacteria, so abundant were these bodies. Sometimes, however, bacteria grow and multiply in the milk of the mother before it has escaped from the breast, and the changes effected in the milk by the growth and multiplication of these organisms, it need scarcely be said, render it quite unfit for the sustenance of the infant; and such milk, were it taken, would, except perhaps in the very strongest children, give rise to serious derangement of the digestive organs. In such a case the maternal secretion must have been out of order at the time of its production, or the bacteria would not have grown and multiplied in it. It is certain that in such secretions and in the glands that pro- duce them ordinary bacteria-germs are invariably present, but they do j not generally increase and multiply until long after the secretion has ] been discharged from the gland. Erroneous notions have been spread far and wide by sensational 1](https://iiif.wellcomecollection.org/image/b2130340x_0090.jp2/full/800%2C/0/default.jpg)
