CHAPTER XVII. 



ON RELATIONS OF SEPTIC TO PATHOGENIC ORGANISMS. 1 



THERE is hardly any question which to the pathologist and 

 sanitary officer can be of greater importance than the relation 

 of septic to pathogenic organisms. To the pathologist the 

 life history of a micro-organism, outside and within the animal 

 body, must ever remain an important field of inquiry ; to the 

 sanitary officer all conditions affecting the life and death of 

 those organisms which produce, or at least are intimately 

 bound up with, infectious diseases, such as the distribution 

 and growth of these micro-organisms outside the animal 

 body, the agencies which affect it in a favourable and 

 unfavourable sense, are the points which he has particularly 

 to consider in dealing with the spread and prevention of 

 infectious maladies. Now, it is known of many micro- 

 organisms, both those that are associated with putrefactive 

 processes as well as those that are bound up with infectious 

 disease, that temperature, the medium in which they grow, 

 presence and absence of certain chemical compounds are 

 capable of materially affecting them. I need not for this 



1 The greater part of this chapter is copied from an interim report 

 by myself to the Medical Officer of the Local Government Board, 

 1884. 



