14 THE AMOEBAE LIVING IN MAN 



debatable, it is unnecessary to argue about them. Indeed, one can but 

 express surprise when a worker so experienced in other fields as 

 Marchoux (1918) now asks us to reconsider whether there is, after all, 

 such a thing as amoebic dysentery. Opinions such as this can only be 

 regarded as anachronisms, which time will eventually set right. 



Although it seems probable that our knowledge of the oral and 

 intestinal amoebae of man is now in a state approaching finality,* this 

 cannot, unfortunately, be said of some of the other amoeboid organisms 

 which have been described from other situations in human beings. 

 There is little doubt, however, that many of these are not amoebae at 

 all, but tissue cells or other bodies mistaken for amoebae. I shall con- 

 sider some of the more important of these later. It will suffice here 

 merely to notice the possible existence of such organisms. 



After this brief introductory survey I shall now pass on to consider 

 in detail the individual species of amoebae which live in man. But 

 before doing so it is necessary to say a few words about the genera to 

 which these species belong — a subject which is by no means free from 

 difficulties owing to the present limited state of knowledge of the 

 amoebae in general. 



* It is, perhaps, not superfluous to point out that although we now possess much 

 exact and probably definitive knowledge of the intestinal amoebae of man, the literature 

 of the subject is still in the greatest confusion. There is not a single text-book, either 

 zoological or medical, which contains an even approximately correct account of these 

 amoebae. Medical works such as those of Brown (1910), Craig (191 1), Rogers (1913), 

 and Phillips (1915), on amoebae and amoebiasis, and the zoological treatises of Doflein 

 (1911), Minchin (1912), Brumpt (1913), and others, are compact with errors of all sorts. 

 Inexperienced workers should be specially warned against the work of Rogers (1913), 

 which — though it contains many excellent clinical and other observations — does not con- 

 tain reliable information concerning the amoebae of man. The figures of "amoebae" 

 in this work are quite unrecognizable, and most misleading. 



