554 Sir John Rose Bradford [Mav 30. 



many respects these viruses were analogous to other better known 

 and larger organisms. There is a well-known malady, poliomyelitis, 

 sometimes called infantile paralysis from the frequency with which it 

 attacks children, that is always present amongst us to some degree, 

 and which sometimes assumes epidemic proportions in various parts 

 of the world. Although many of its features were well known, its 

 cause was unknown until Land stein er and Popper in 1908 showed 

 that the disease could be transmitted to animals by inoculation with 

 material derived from the spinal cord of fatal human cases. This 

 was confirmed by Flesner and Lewis in 1909. At this time it was 

 also known that the virus was filtrable through certain filters, but the 

 great step forward was made in 1913 when, thanks to a method of 

 culture devised by Xoguchi, Flexner and Noguchi succeeded in 

 growing the virus outside the body in the laboratory. This method 

 is now known as the Xoguchi method, and is the one that has been 

 used in our work in France. 



Flexner and Noguchi succeeded in demonstrating that the virus 

 of poliomyelitis consisted of minute rounded bodies O'I^/jl to 0"3/x 

 in diameter, that it could be stained, and that the pure culture when 

 inoculated into animals reproduced the clinical picture and the 

 lesions of the original disease, and finally that the organism could be 

 recovered from the tissues of such experimental animals. These 

 observations not only showed that Koch's postulates had been ful- 

 filled as regards this important disease of the nervous system, but 

 they also showed that a certain filter-passing organism could be 

 grown artificially, stained, and so rendered clearly visible under high 

 powers of the microscope. Up to this time such organisms had only 

 been seen as minute dots, but now it was possible to proceed further, 

 and the virus in question was described as a globoid, not only on 

 account of its rounded appearance, but also because staining revealed 

 some differentiation into a more or less central darkly staining por- 

 tion surrounded by a zone of variable width of less deeply stained 

 material. Further, they tend to form masses or colonies, having a 

 zoogloea-like appearance, in that it is difficult to separate sharply the 

 contours of the individual elements. The darkly stained central 

 portions of the organisms stand out conspicuously in the mass of 

 more faintly stained material. The position of these globoid bodies 

 in the scale of nature was and is still uncertain, although from their 

 culture, and also to some extent from their staining reactions, they 

 show affinities to the bacteria and thus to the vegetable kingdom. 



Another American observer, Foster, in 1917 studied, Avith the aid 

 of the Noguchi method, that familiar ailment the common cold, and 

 was successful in growing a minute filter-passing organism in this 

 disease. 



We have now concluded a short and necessarily imperfect sum- 

 mary of the principal results obtained in this branch of knowledge 

 prior to the war, and I will now pass on to the work carried out 



