162 THE BACTERIA IN ASIATIC CHOLERA. [CH. 



produced in some other manner, and that the presence of 

 the comma-bacilli in the stools was a result and not a cause 

 of the state of the alimentary canal. After reading the 

 details of the case, I am quite of the opinion of von 

 Pettenkofer. The gentleman in question had been five 

 days in Berlin when he was attacked by slight digestive 

 disturbance, accompanied with diarrhoea. Surely it is not a 

 very remarkable occurrence, that a gentleman coming from 

 some healthy country place to a big city like Berlin should, 

 under altogether new conditions of water, diet, and mode of 

 life, be attacked by digestive trouble and diarrhoea. To put 

 that at once down as due to his having swallowed a few 

 comma-bacilli is going a little too far. A person thus altered 

 may, apart from other considerations, accidentally have 

 swallowed in Koch's laboratory the choleraic comma-bacilli, 

 which, arriving in a diseased intestine, found the necessary 

 conditions of multiplying : but the disease itself probably was 

 antecedent. Amongst the hundreds, nay, thousands of 

 persons who, in the various laboratories in Europe and else- 

 where, ever since the first epidemic outbreak of cholera in 

 France in 1884, have handled the choleraic comma-bacilli 

 in large quantities for the sake of study and experiment, has 

 there been any other case ? No ; and the above instance, 

 quoted by Koch, is therefore single and isolated; the expla- 

 nation of ' cholerine ' in this gentleman as given by Koch 

 remains therefore unsupported ; and it would be going far 

 beyond the necessities of the case if we were to accept the 

 belief of Koch as to the method of infection in this case. 

 That a pathological state of the intestine has a good deal to 

 do with the multiplication of comma-bacilli I have proved by 

 direct experiment. In a monkey, which had received the 

 previous day a dose of castor-oil, and had diarrhoea therefrom^ 

 the abdomen was opened under the spray, a loop of the 



