44 THE GEHM THEORY OF DISEASE. 



microscopic organisms. This kind of evidence has served as 

 the basis of practice, and been the means of producing im- 

 provements in the management of wounds particularly, 

 greater than the most sanguine theorist could have expected 

 thirty years ago. 



DIRECT EXAMINATION. 



It may surprise some when I say that the first definite 

 demonstration of micro-organisms in the tissues of those dying 

 of traumatic disease was made by Rindfleisch, in 1866. Reck- 

 ]inghausen and Waldeyer demonstrated the same thing about 

 the same time. Directly afterward, Birsch Hirschfield found, 

 by extended examinations, that the unhealthfulnessof a wound 

 stood in direct relation to the numbers of spherical bacteria 

 found in the pus of that wound. He also found that the 

 blood of pysemic patients contained bacteria during life. 



HIRSCHFIELD. 



Dr. Birsch Hirschfield, on examining daily the pus coming 

 from a wound, found that, with the ushering in of the first 

 symptoms of pyaBmia, the pus showed a corresponding change, 

 consisting in the presence of micrococci, either in pairs, strings 

 or zooglea (masses of micro-organisms, of whatever kind, often 

 imbedded in a gelatinous mass, the latter especially when 

 pyaemia was far advanced or rapid in its course), and in an 

 altered appearance of the pus corpuscles, which were finely 

 granular, of less definite outline and lustre, and showed 

 their nuclei very distinctly, without the addition of reagents. 



The blood of such patients contained similar micrococci, 

 and its white corpuscles had undergone a change very similar 

 to that of the pus corpuscles. He sometimes found that pus 

 from a pya3mic patient would contain besides these a quantity 

 of the bacterium termo or bacterium lineola, which are the 



