310 OFFICIAL REFUTATION OF DR. KOCH’S THEORY 
change; all assertions to the contrary must be put down 
as based on imperfect method of examination or insufficient 
acquaintance with the appearances of blood in health and 
disease” (page 16). . . . 
«Numerous cultivations were made with the juice of the 
mesenteric glands, but no trace of bacteria was obtained, 
except in those tubes in which clearly and unmistakeably putre- 
factive micrococci or putrefactive thickish bacilli had found 
their entrance. Thus, then, as regards the blood and tissues, 
the conclusion is imperative that no kind of bacteria are present 
in patients suffering from cholera” (page 17). 
8. The foregoing extracts, especially when taken in con- 
nection with observations recorded by other observers, appear 
to justify the inference that no direct relation exists between 
the number of comma-shaped organisms associated with the 
choleraic process and the gravity of the disease, and that these 
organisms are not found in the blood or tissues, and are not 
ordinarily, if ever, to be found in the tissues of any part of the 
intestinal canal in even the most acute cases of cholera when 
the post-mortem examination is made immediately after death. 
9. Passing on to the second of the above formulated propo- 
sitions—that comma-bacilli are not found under any conditions 
other than cholera—Drs. Klein and Gibbes assert that “ this 
cholera bacillus, or at any rate one that in morphological 
respects appears identical with it, occurs also in the stools of 
cases of diarrhcea. In an epidemic of diarrhoea that occur- 
red in the autumn of 1883 in Cornwall, the stools of the 
patients contained . . . curved organisms which it is 
impossible to distinguish from the comma-bacillus of 
cholera stools; in size they are the same, in being curved 
they are the same, and, just as is the case with the choleraic 
comma-bacilli, some examples are either slightly pointed at the 
ends or blunt. They occurred not less numerously than they 
are sometimes found in cholera stools” (page 7). They were 
also met with in cases of dysentery and enteric catarrh, and 
“in a case of chronic phthisis of which a post-mortem exami- 
nation was made, the mucus of the small intestine, although 
