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cTbe ^Development of tbe (Berm C^beor?. 



By H. Langley Browne, F.R.C.S.E.* 



AS this is one of the occasions upon which custom decrees the 

 breaking of the rule that silence is golden, and having 

 nothing in the way of original research or discovery to 

 bring before you, I think it may be not uninteresting if I draw 

 your attention for a few moments to the *' Modern Development 

 of the Germ Theory of Disease." 



The theory itself is by no means a new one, though the proofs 

 of it have only been forthcoming recently and even yet are not 

 complete. Linnaeus published an article in 1730. attributing 

 smallpox, measles, plague, syphilis, dysentery, and whooping-cough 

 to the agency of minute animals. Ehrenberg in 1828 found 

 numerous organisms in water and dust, and designated them 

 " infusion animals," and in remarking upon the highly organised 

 structure, astonishing minuteness, and fecundity of these animals, 

 argued that they might cause many of the diseases affecting man ; 

 and Schwann in 1837 declared that the atmosphere was laden 

 with germs of fermentation and putrefaction. 



In 1839 Sir Henry Holland published in his Medical Notes 

 and Reflections an article on the " Hypothesis of Animalcule Life 

 as a Cause of Disease " ; an article so clear and logical that I 

 propose to review it at some length. He thought that certain 

 diseases, and particularly some of the epidemic and contagious 

 ones, were derived from some species of animalcule life, existing 

 in the atmosphere under certain circumstances, and capable, by 

 application to the lining membrane, of acting as a virus on the 

 human body. He maintained that there are conditions of animal 

 life in the atmosphere as minute, as numerous, as variously 

 diffused as those visible by the aid of the microscope in water, 

 and that we are carried so far by our actual knowledge of these 

 minute forms of existence, and by such uniform gradations of 

 change, that we must not suppose the series to stop because we 

 can no longer draw evidence from our own senses. This would 



* President's Address, read at the Annual Meeting of the Birmingham and 

 Midland Branch of the British Medical Association June 14, 1894. 



