10 ORIENTAL PLAGUE chap. 



tended by blood : in some of these vessels are seen con- 

 tinuous masses of B. pestis ; particularly is this the case 

 in the medullary part, in which extravasated blood is 

 not uncommon. 



The description given here is taken from the examina- 

 tion of the organs of animals (guinea-pig, rat, mouse) dead 

 of acute plague, but on comparing with them sections 

 through the hardened organs derived from a human subject 

 dead of septicsemic plague, I have no doubt the above 

 description is also correct for the human subject in 

 general. 



(C) Pneumonic Plague. — I have had the opportunity 

 of examining cases of acute pneumonic plague — two sailors 

 who died in the port of Hull in 1902. Pieces of lung and 

 spleen were submitted to bacteriological examination ; the 

 microscopic examination of the juice of the inflamed lung 

 was alone sufficient to make diagnosis certain. Figure 2 

 shows a film specimen of the lung of one case ; in the other 

 case the appearances were exactly the same. The photo 

 shows an almost uniform mass of beautifully stained bi- 

 polar bacilli amongst blood corpuscles, and as there exists, 

 except in plague, no pathological condition — no acute 

 inflammation of the lung — in which a film specimen of the 

 juice shows crowds of uniform bipolar bacilli, the diagnosis 

 could be made at once. Culture and experiment fully 

 confirmed the diagnosis. Also the spleen, in film 

 specimens, showed abundance of bipolar bacilli like B. 

 pestis, but they were not anything like so numerous as in 

 the film specimens of the lung. 



The greater portion of the lung in these cases was in a 

 state of red hepatisation — deeply red, almost purple, — and 

 bits of it sank in water. 



