112 PROGRESS OF MICROSCOPICAL SCIENCE. 



English authorities are inaccurately acquainted with the discovery of 

 Professor Helmholtz, as far back as 1868, of the existence of uncommon 

 low organisms in the nasal secretions in this complaint, and of the 

 possibility of arresting their action by the local employment of quinine. 

 I therefore purpose to republish the letter in which he originally 

 annoimced these facts to myself, and to add some further observations 

 on this topic. The letter is as follows : * — 



" ' I have suffered, as well as I can remember, since the year 1847, 

 from the peculiar catarrh called by the English "hay-fever," the 

 speciality of which consists in its attacking its victim regidarly in 

 the hay season (myself between May 20 and the end of June), that it 

 ceases in the cooler weather, but on the other hand quickly reaches 

 a great intensity if the patients expose themselves to heat and sunshine. 

 An extraordinarily voilent sneezing then sets in, and a strongly 

 corrosive thin discharge, with which much epithelium is thrown off. 

 This increases, after a few hours, to a painful inflammation of the 

 mucous membrane and of the outside of the nose, and excites fever 

 ■with severe headache and great depression, if the patient cannot 

 withdraw himself from the heat and the sunshine. In a cold room, 

 however, these symptoms vanish as quickly as they come on, and there 

 then only remains for a few days a lessened discharge and soreness, as 

 if caused by the loss of epithelium. I remark, by the way, that in all 

 my other years I had very little tendency to catarrh or catching cold, 

 while the hay-fever has never failed dm-ing the twenty-one years of 

 which I have spoken, and has never attacked me earlier or later in the 

 year than the times named. The condition is extremely troublesome, 

 and increases, if one is obliged to be much exposed to the sun, to an 

 excessively severe malady. 



" ' The curious dependence of the disease on the season of the 

 year suggested to me the thought that organisms might be the origin 

 of the mischief. In examining the secretions I regularly found, in 

 the last five years, certain vibrio-like bodies in it, which at other 

 times I could not observe in my nasal secretion. . . . They are very 

 small, and can only be recognized with the immersion-lens of a very 

 good Hartnack's microscope. It is characteristic of the common 

 isolated single joints that they contain four nuclei in a row, of which 

 two pairs are more closely united. The length of the joints is • 004 

 millimetre. Upon the warm objective-stage they move with moderate 

 activity, partly in mere vibration, partly shooting backwards and 

 forwards in the direction of their long axis ; in lower temperatures 

 they are very inactive. Occasionally one finds them arranged in rows 

 upon each other, or in branching series. Observed some days in the 

 moist chamber, they vegetated again, and appeared somewhat larger 

 and more consjiicuous than immediately after their excretion. It is 

 to be noted that only that kind of secretion contains them which is 

 expelled by violent sneezings ; that which drops slowly does not 

 contain any. They stick tenaciously enough in the lower cavities 

 and recesses of the nose. 



" ' When I saw your first notice respecting the poisonous action of 

 * See Virchow's ' Archiv,' vol. xlvi. 



