24 PATHOGENIC BACTERIA. 



places, that certain minute animals breed [there] which 

 are invisible to the eye, and yet, getting into the sys- 

 tem through mouth and nostrils, cause serious disor- 

 ders (diseases which are difficult to treat)" a doctrine 

 which, as Prof. L,amberton, to whom the writer is in- 

 debted for the extract, points out, is handed down to us 

 from "the days of Cicero and Caesar," yet corresponds 

 closely to the ideas of malaria which we entertain at 

 present. 



Pasteur had long before suggested that for the different 

 kinds of fermentation there must be specific ferments, 

 and by fractional cultures had succeeded in roughly sepa- 

 rating them. 



Klebs, who was one of the pioneers of the germ 

 theory, published in 1872 his work upon septicemia and 

 pyemia, in which he expressed himself convinced that 

 the causes of these diseases must come from without the 

 body. Billroth strongly opposed such an idea, asserting 

 that fungi had no especial importance either in the pro- 

 cesses of disease or in those of decomposition, but that, 

 existing everywhere in the air, they rapidly developed in 

 the body as soon as through putrefaction a ' ' Faulniss- 

 zymoid," or through inflammation a " phlogistische- 

 zymoid," supplying the necessary feeding-grounds, was 

 produced. 



Klebs was not alone in the opposition aroused. Da- 

 vaine no sooner announced the contagium of anthrax 

 than critics declared that inasmuch as he introduced 

 blood from 'the diseased animal into the other animal 

 to whom the disease was to be communicated, it was 

 altogether unreasonable to believe the bacilli which were 

 in all probability accidentally present in that blood were 

 the cause of the disease. 



In 1875 the number of scientific men who had embraced 

 the germ theory of disease was small, and most of those 

 who accepted it were experimenters. A great majority 

 of medical men either believed, like Billroth, that the 

 presence of fungi where decomposition was in progress 



