PROGRESS OF THE GERM THEORY OF DISEASE. 465 



only to all appearance still more cogent, would prove animals and 

 plants, even of large species, to originate spontaneously ; that this evi- 

 dence is therefore of no weight ; and, lastly, that all the really impor- 

 tant facts point the other way, and tend to prove that these poisons 

 (to use a term which is probably provisional only), like animals and 

 plants, however they may have once originated, are only propagated 

 now by the law of continuous succession." 



The word " poisons," here provisionally employed, was a concession 

 on Budd's part to his weaker brethren ; for he, without a shade of 

 doubt, considered the poison to be a real living seed. There was, I 

 believe, but one physician of eminence in England who, at the time 

 here referred to, shared this conviction, and who imparted to Budd 

 the incalculable force derived from the approbation and encourage- 

 ment of a wise and celebrated man. It gives me singular pleasure to 

 write down here the name of the venerable Sir Thomas Watson, who 

 lent to William Budd unfailing countenance and support, and who has 

 lived to see that the views which commended themselves to his philo- 

 sophic judgment are at the present moment advancing with resistless 

 momentum among the members of the medical profession. It was far 

 otherwise at the time to which we here refer. " Opinions like these," 

 said Budd, " are no doubt, at present, those of a small minority. A 

 very large, and by far the most influential school in this country a 

 school which probably embraces the great majority of medical practi- 

 tioners, and the whole of the 'sanitary public' holds the exact con- 

 trary ; and teaches that sundry of these poisons are constantly being 

 generated de novo by the material conditions which surround us." 



Budd's remark regarding the spontaneous generation of " animals 

 and plants, even of large species," is both pregnant and pertinent. In 

 reference to special and solitary outbreaks of contagious fever, I have 

 frequently heard physicians of distinction affirm, without apparent mis- 

 giving, the " impossibility " of importation from without. On such 

 occasions a reply, in the strict sense affirmed by William Budd, was 

 always at hand ; for I was able to adduce cases of solitary mushrooms, 

 found upon out-of-the-way Alpine slopes, to which the evidence would 

 apply with greater force than to the cases on which the physicians re- 

 ferred to based their conclusions. With the atmosphere as a vehicle 

 of universal intercommunication, it is hard to see any just warrant for 

 the reliance of medical men upon the negative evidence stigmatized 

 by Budd as valueless. It is, however, evidence by which many physi- 

 cians are still influenced, and the effects of which it will probably re- 

 quire a generation of doctors, brought up under other conditions of 

 culture and of practice, to wholly sweep away. 



These conditions are growing up around us, and their influence will 

 be all-pervading before long. Never before was medicine manned 

 and officered as it is>now. To name here the workers at present en- 

 gaged in the investigation of communicable diseases would be to ex- 

 vol. xxi. 30 



