11)19] on A Filter-passing Virus in Certain Diseases 555 



during the last two years in the British Expeditionary Force in 

 France in certain field lal)oratories attached to Xo. 20 and Xo. 2G 

 General Hospitals. This work was carried on with the co-operation 

 of Captain J. A. Wilson and Captain E. F. Bashford, and the results 

 obtained are mainly dependent upon their work. This work did not 

 arise as an investigation of so-called " filter-passers," it began as an 

 enquiry into the causation of a peculiar and little-known form of 

 paralysis that occurred from time to time as a rare form of disease 

 amongst the troops, known technically as " febrile polyneuritis." It 

 will suffice to say here that up to the time of the war its causation 

 was unknown, and it had been but little studied owing to its rarity. 

 Observations carried out at Etaples showed, first of all, that the 

 disease co'uld be communicated to animals from nervous material 

 obtained from fatal human cases, by a method similar to that used 

 for the experimental transmissioQ of rabies and of poliomyelitis. A 

 small portion of nervous material is preserved for a short time in 

 glycerine, and this emulsion inoculated intracranially and subdurally 

 into the monkey. The disease can be transmitted in this manner to 

 the monkey with an incubation period of six weeks, and the same 

 lesions are found in the monkey as in man. These experiments 

 proved that this so-called polyneuritis was fundamentally different to 

 many other varieties of neuritis, in that it was really an infection, 

 and thus had obvious affinities with poliomyelitis. Hence it was 

 natural to try by further experiments whether methods of culture 

 that had been successful in the case of poliomyelitis would be 

 equally successful in polyneuritis. This proved to be the case, and 

 Captain Bashford demonstrated the experimental transmission of the 

 disease and Captain Wilson was successful in growing a globoid 

 organism both from man naturally infected and from the monkey 

 experimentally inoculated with material derived from fatal human 

 cases. Further, the disease was also produced by inoculation of the 

 pure subculture, thus Koch's postulates were complied with in 

 regard to this malady. 



The main point of interest in these observations was the 

 discovery that the organism of poliomyelitis was not a unique 

 and solitary example, since we had obtained a similar organism, 

 differing in some respects it is true, from another, but allied 

 disease. This became the starting-point of observations on a series 

 of diseases, and the two conditions first investigated were rabies 

 and trench fever. Rabies was selected Ijecause the clinical re- 

 semblance between the palsy of polyneuritis and that of dumb rabies 

 gave us the first clue to the successful investigation of polyneuritis 

 by experimental methods. Ral)ies can be communicated by this 

 method of inoculation of glycerine emulsion of the brain, and poly- 

 neuritis was found to be so communicable also. Trench fever was 

 investigated because of its great importance from a military point of 

 view and because recent work had shown that the unknown virus was 



