MICROPHYTES FOUND IN THE BLOOD. 365 



fied himself that they were found in the blood during life ; 

 that they developed in this fluid and not in the spleen; in 

 fact, he had been able to transfer the organisms to animals 

 whose spleen had been removed. He also ascertained that 

 bacteridia are not found in foetal blood, although the blood of the 

 mother and of the placenta was crowded with them.^ The disease 

 was found to be communicable with the food by mixing with it 

 some of the tissues of diseased animals ; the eflFects were less 

 rapidly induced, but the blood became equally affected with 

 bacteridia. He refuses to accept the doctrine of identity of the 

 poison of septicaemia and charbon, on the grounds (1) that the 

 symptoms produced by inoculating animals with putrefying 

 blood are not constantly the same, and that bacteridia do not 

 develop in the circulation of the affected animal ; (2) that ani- 

 mals which have swallowed fragments of putrefied tissue rarely 

 died; and (3) that animals which had swallowed fragments of 

 the fresh tissue of animals which had died of septicaemia had 

 been in no way affected. He therefore concluded that the active 

 principle of septicaemia was not regenerated in the animal economy, 

 as in the case of charbon, the latter in fact being a vims and 

 the former apoisonJ^ 



In the following number of the * Coraptes Rendus ' (p. 429), 

 MM. Davaine and Raimbert announce that they had demon- 

 strated the existence of bacteridia in a man affected with pustule 

 maligne, the excised pustule having contained a great number.^ 

 Portions of this pustule-tissue having being introduced beneath 

 the skin of some animals, the latter succumbed, and after death 

 their blood was found to contain a considerable number of 

 bacteridia. 



Such, in a few words, were the observations which drew the 

 special attention of pathologists to this question, and gave 

 marked impetus to the doctrine of disease germs. Since this 

 time very many observations have been recorded, but those of 

 the past two or three years have been particularly valuable from 

 the circumstance that distinct parts of the subject have been 

 taken up by observers peculiarly qualified to deal with the different 

 phases of the extremely complex phenomena which come under 



1 ' Comptes Rendus,' t. lix, p. 393, 1864. 



2 Loc. cit., p. 396. As will subsequently be seen, some of these conclu- 

 sions are no longer tenable. 



' Dr. Crisp writes : " As I described in my work on the spleen (1S52), 

 dogs, cats, ferrets and pigs, that ale the flesh of these animals, died in a 

 short time, and men that flayed the oxen were afl'ected. In 1832 M. 

 Barthelemy inoculated sheep from the blood of sheep that died of splenic 

 apoplexy, and the inoculated animals died in from thirty-six to sixty hours." 

 — A footnote to the remarks made regarding the ' Germ Tiieory,' at the 

 Pathological Society, 24th April, 1875. 



