296 BACTERIA IN INFECTIOUS DISEASES. 



liquid containing an abundance of micrococci." [It 

 must be remembered that the injection of normal human 

 saliva into rabbits produces similar results.] 



Wood and Formad give the following summary 

 statement of the conclusions reached by them as 

 a result of their experimental investigation, in 

 their final report, which has only recently been 

 published, although it was sent to the National 

 Board of Health in September, 1882 : 



" Micrococci are an essential part of the diphtheritic 

 process, being always found locally at the seat of 

 inflammation, and, when blood-poisoning develops, also 

 in the blood, attacking and destroying the white blood- 

 corpuscles, forming emboli in the kidneys, spleen, and 

 other organs. . . . The micrococci of diphtheria do not 

 differ, so far as observed, from the micrococci of furred 

 tongue, etc., except in their tendency to grow in culture- 

 fluids. . . . The theory of the disease, which we would 

 deduce from these facts, is that the micrococcus which 

 causes the diphtheria is not a specific organism different 

 from that common to healthy and inflamed throats, but 

 is an active state of that organism ; that certain cir- 

 cumstances outside % of the human body are capable of 

 throwing this common micrococcus into the condition 



NOTE. We remark that the fact mentioned on page 205, with refer- 

 ence to the failure of four or five minutes' boiling to destroy the conta- 

 gious power of diphtheritic membrane, in some instances, is opposed to 

 the view that the micrococcus found in it is the contagious principle ; 

 for the thermal death-point of this micrococcus is only 140 Fnlir., as 

 determined by the writer's experiments (see page 223). It may In , how- 

 ever, that the masses used in the experiments in which the contagious 

 power was not destroyed were not penetrated by the heat, during this 

 short exposure, and that micrococci in the interior of the mate-rial 

 escaped destruction for this reason. 



