INAUGURAL ADDRESS. 73- 



rely for a great part of our food, could not exist were it 

 not for the nitrification of the soil through the agency of 

 certain bacteria. Within the year, no less an authority 

 than Pasteur, in presenting a pupil's paper to the French 

 Academy, which claimed to demonstrate that seeds cannot 

 germinate in a soil entirely free from these microbes, as 

 the French style them, even went so far as to assert that 

 he has long held the opinion that not only the germination 

 of seeds, but many of the functions both of plants and 

 animals, depend upon their presence. 



To the physician, the study of bacteria is of more than 

 usual interest. Their history is, unfortunately, not one of 

 benefit alone, nor of simple discomfort. All of them, 

 from their organization, need organized matter for an im- 

 portant part of their food. While the majority of species 

 claim this only after it has become effete, there are some 

 which do not wait for death. A constant warfare is waged 

 against them by all animate creation, — successful in many 

 instances till death from some other cause puts an end to it, 

 but unavailing in others. 



The germ theory of disease has been so freely discussed 

 in the public press that it is familiar, at least by name, to 

 nearly every one who reads the daily papers. Nothing is at 

 first thought more startling than the paradox that death from 

 the dreaded zymotic diseases is the manifestation of a lower 

 life within the patient ; yet I do not hesitate to say that this 

 is more than probable of many infectious diseases. To name 

 a few is sufficient. Anthrax, small-pox, relapsing fever, 

 and the various forms of pyaemia and septicaemia are of this 

 nature. While the proof is not equally good, for them, 

 diphtheria, erysipehis, typhoid and typhus fevers, yellow 

 fever, and even the too familiar malarial diseases, are be- 

 lieved by able medical men to be germ diseases, and are al- 

 most universally treated by the profession on this basis. I 

 do not doubt that consumption and other forms of tubercular 

 disease, together with leprosy and cholera, should fall under 

 the same category, though a perusal of the current litera- 



