OUR RECENT DEBTS TO VIVISECTION. n 



By these experiments and operations a wide door is open to sur- 

 gery in the treatment of diseases within the skull diseases heretofore 

 so obscure and uncertain that we have hardly dared to attack them. 

 The question is not whether death or recovery followed in these par- 

 ticular cases. The great, the startling, the encouraging fact is that, 

 thanks to these experiments, we can now, with well-nigh absolute cer- 

 tainty, diagnosticate, and with the greatest accuracy locate such dis- 

 eases, and therefore reach them by operation, and treat them success- 

 fully. Would that I had been born twenty-five years later, that I 

 might enjoy with you the full luxury of such magnilicent life-saving, 

 health-giving discoveries ! 



It is, however, by the experimental study of the effects of minute 

 organisms microbes, as they are now called that some of the latest 

 and most remarkable results have been achieved. The labors of Koch, 

 Pasteur, Klein, Cheyne, Tommasi-Crudeli, Wood, Formad, Sternberg, 

 and others, are now known even to the daily press. Let us see what 

 they have done. 



It is but three years since Koch announced that consumption was 

 caused by the " bacillus tuberculosis." Later he has studied cholera 

 and found the "comma-bacillus," to which he ascribes that dreaded 

 disease. In spite of the opposition of prominent scientists, his views 

 have been in general accepted, and seem to be reasonable. 



The method of experiment is simple, though difficult. The sus- 

 pected expectoration or discharge is placed in a suitable soil, and after 

 cultivation some of this growth is placed in another culture-soil, and 

 so on till generation after generation is produced, the violence of the 

 poison being modified by each culture. A small portion of any one of 

 these cultures is then injected under the skin of a mouse or other ani- 

 mal, and in time it dies or is killed, and the results are verified by the 

 post-mortem. 



So exact is the knowledge in tuberculosis now that Koch can pre- 

 dict almost to an hour when the mouse will die of consumption, or that 

 it will escape, according to the culture used. 



It is far too early as yet to say that these studies have borne the 

 immense practical fruit that the next few years will show ; but they 

 have already enabled us to recognize by the microscope doubtful cases 

 of consumption in their earlier and more remediable stages, and have 

 made certain what has hitherto been only a probability that consump- 

 tion is distinctly contagious. 



By Gerlach's experiments on animals with the milk from tuber- 

 cular cows, also, it has been shown that consumption may be con- 

 tracted from such milk. How important this conclusion is, in so 

 universal an article of food to young and old, I need not do aught 

 than state. 



The experiments of Wood and Formad on diphtheria I have already 

 alluded to. Those of Tommasi-Crudeli also have shown that probably 



