Pruparatorv to RiiSHARCn Carhi-r 37 



facts about human diseases and their etiology was evident 

 throughout the two volumes when the department appeared. He 

 included references to documents on diphtheria and scarlet fever, 

 to prevention and treatment of other diseases; and, once warning 

 against a threatened epidemic of smallpox, he urged that the 

 current prejudice against " vaccine points " was unfounded. Later, 

 during the summer of ISS"^, when a serious outbreak of typhoid 

 fever occurred in Ionia, Smith addressed a letter to his former 

 fellow- townsmen in which he advanced impure water supplies 

 and lack of proper sewage disposal as probable causes.''' It is not 

 known definitely when his studious interest in malaria was first 

 aroused. But it was soon after the year 1881 that he began to 

 read on the subject and sometime during or before 1883 when he 

 learned that Edwin Klebs, noted German physician and patholo- 

 gist and one-time assistant of the great Rudolph Virchow, was 

 believed to have discovered in 1879 " the cause of malarial fever." 

 Smith described in his "Index Rerum " the manner in which the 

 ''Bacillus vialariae" was cultivated. 



In 1873 Klebs, in an important treatise, " Beitraege zur Kennt- 

 niss dcr Micrococcen," ^^ had outlined his fractional method of 

 culture study. No reference to this was made by Smith in his 

 valuable index entries, nor to any other of Klebs's discoveries. 

 Emile Duclaux, in his book Pasteur: The History of a Mind,'^^ 

 accredits Klebs with having found bacterial organisms in purulent 

 nephritis (1865) and with having in 1872 "shown how, starting 

 from a wound, bacteria could penetrate the lymphatics or the 

 veins by means of the interstices of the connective tissue, and from 

 there infect the thrombi of the blood vessels or produce abscesses. 

 Then," Duclaux concludes, "came the discovery of bacteria in 

 erysipelas, hospital gangrene, puerperal fever, diphtheria and 

 other diseases." 



Erwin F. Smith's interest in the bacteria may have been started 

 by his reading of Dr. Sternberg's translation of Antoine Magnin's 



1882, and were concluded May 31, 1883. Citations are dispensed with because of 

 their abundance. See volumes 2 and 3 of the publication. 



^^ Report of the Sec'y of the Mich. State Board of Health for the year 1885; 

 278. 



^* Arch. f. exp. Path. u. Pharmakol. 1: 31-64, with four plates, 1873. 



*^ Translated by Erwin F. Smith and Florence Hedges, 248-249, Philadelphia and 

 London, W. B. Saunders Co., 1920. 



