64 The Microscope. 



VIEWS ON THE CHOLERA BACILLUS. 



Later reports of the work of Drs. Klein and Gibbes (the 

 English cholera commission) in India justify their conclusions 

 more than what we had seen when speaking of it last week. 

 Their results are summed up in the Gazette of India for Nov. 

 28, 1884 {Lancet, Jan. 5, 1885), and are as follows: 1°. They 

 find " comma bacilli,' so called, in other diseases than cholera, as 

 epidemic diarrhoea, dysentery, and intestinal catarrh, associated 

 with phthisis. 2°. They did not find the comma bacilli in typ- 

 ical cases of cholera in anything like the numbers claimed by 

 Koch: they never approached the appearance of a 'pure cul- 

 ture ' in the ileum. 3°. They did not find the comma bacilli in 

 the tissues of the intestines, or elsewhere, as Koch did. 4°. 

 Klein was unable to discover that the comma bacilli differed 

 from any other putrefactive organism under cultivation. 5°. 

 They found peculiar-shaped bacilli, very small and straight, in 

 the mucous-corpuscles found in the mucus-flakes removed from 

 the intestine soon after death from cholera : they found these 

 same bacilli always, even when the comma bacilli were not 

 discovered. 6°. These bacilli do not behave in any peculiar 

 way under cultivation and are not to be found in the tissues of 

 the intestines, or elsewhere. 7°. They did not find any bacte- 

 ria of any kind in the blood, or in any other tissue. 8°. Many 

 experiments gave the following results : {a) Mice, rats, cats and 

 monkeys were fed with rice-water stools, with vomitus, with 

 mucus-flakes from the ileum, both fresh and after having been 

 kept for twenty-four hours (the animals remained in good 

 health); (b) Inoculations with recent and old cultures of the 

 comma bacillus, and of the small straight bacillus, as well as 

 with mucus-flakes, were made into the subcutaneous tissue, into 

 the peritoneal cavity of the small and large intestine of rabbits, 

 cats, and monkeys ; but the animals remained perfectly well 

 and normal. — Science, from the Lancet for January. 



Prof. E. Ray Lankester does not hesitate to say: (1) that 

 Koch's comma bacillus is not comma-shaped ; (2) that it is not 

 a bacillus but a spirillum ; that although it does sometimes (but 

 not always) occur abundantly in the intestines of cholera pa- 

 tients, there is not a tittle of evidence to show that it causes 



