264 



PARASITES OF MAN 



An extremely interesting account of this worm has been 

 published by Prof. Aitken, accompanied with illustrations by 

 Dr H. C. Gillespie, taken from specimens in the Pathological 

 Museum at Netley. Two cases are recorded. In one of these the 

 encysted worms were found in the liver and lungs, 

 and in the other in the liver only. In Dr Craw- 

 ford's account of the post mortem in the last-men- 

 tioned case, Prof. Aitken quotes him as saying : 

 " These worms varied in length from an inch to an 

 inch and a half, and were found coiled up like a 

 watch-spring, in small sacs scattered throughout 

 the whole organ." The patient was a private 

 of the 1st West India Regiment, and died at 

 Bathurst, Gambia, in 1854. In the other case, 

 where the lungs and liver were infested, the patient 

 was an African, about twenty-one years old, who 

 had enlisted into the 5th West India Regiment 

 at Up Park Camp, Jamaica. He had, a few months 

 previously, come from the slave depot at Rupert's 

 Valley, St Helena. According to the post-mortem 

 report, furnished by Mr Kearney (staff surgeon), 

 After Biiharz. ^ Q i ower i o b e o f the right lung contained one or 

 two yellow specks. " When cut into, worms were seen regularly 

 encysted in its substance." The surface of the liver was 

 dotted over " with about twenty or thirty yellow specks, similar 

 to those seen in the lung." The longest of these specimens 

 was a trifle less than three quarters of an inch. 



Whether Pent, denticulatum be or be not devoid of clinical 

 interest, it is quite clear from Aitken's account that P. con- 

 strictum is a formidable parasite and one that occasionally proves 

 fatal to the bearer. As his remarks suggest, a parasite that 

 can produce both pneumonia and peritonitis is not a creature 

 that either the physician or the sanitarian can afford to ignore. 

 Lastly, I must again express my belief that the so-called 

 Echinorhynchus, described by Welch, if it be not the Pentastoma 

 denticulatum, must either be referred to P. constrictum (in an 

 early larval condition), or to some other hitherto undescribed 

 pentastomatoid larva. 



BIBLIOGRAPHY (No. 37). Aitlcen, W., "On the occurrence of 

 Pentastoma constrictum in the Human Body as a cause of painful 

 Disease and Death," repr. from the ' Science and Practice of 

 Medicine/ ith edit,, 18G5.Bellingham, in ' Ann. Nat. Hist./ 



