CHAPTER XXVIII 



BACILLUS D1PHTHEKI.E, BACILLUS HOFFMANNI, AND BACILLUS 



XEBOSIS 



BACILLUS DIPHTHERLffi 



SINCE 1821, when Bretonneau of Tours published his observations, 

 diphtheria has been an accurately recognized clinical entity. Our 

 knowledge of the disease in the sense of modern bacteriology, however, 

 begins with the first description of Bacillus diphtheria by Klebs in 1883. 

 Klebs 1 had observed in the pseudomembranes from diphtheritic throats, 

 bacilli which in the light of more recent knowledge we can hardly fail 

 to recognize as the true diphtheria organism. His work, however, was 

 purely morphological and, therefore, inconclusive. One year after 

 this announcement, Loeffler 2 isolated and cultivated an organism which 

 corresponded in its morphological characters to the one described by 

 Klebs. He obtained it from thirteen clinically unquestioned cases 

 of diphtheria, and, by inoculating it upon the injured mucous surfaces 

 of animals, succeeded in producing lesions which resembled closely the 

 false membranes of the human disease. His failure to find the bacillus 

 in all the" cases he examined, his finding it, in one instance, in a normal 

 throat, and his inability to explain to his own satisfaction some of the 

 systemic manifestations of the infection which we now know to be due 

 to the toxin, caused him to frame his conclusions in a tone of the utmost 

 conservatism. The second and third publications of Loeffler, 3 however, 

 and the inquiry into the nature of the toxins produced by the bacillus, 

 published in 1888 by Roux and Yersin, 4 eliminated all remaining doubt 

 as to the etiological relationship existing between this organism and the 

 disease. 



Innumerable observations, both clinical and bacteriological, by other 

 workers, have, since that time, confirmed the early investigations, 

 and it is to-day a scientific necessity to find the bacillus of Klebs and 



1 Klebs, Verh. d. 2. Kongr. f. inn. Medizin, Wiesbaden, 1883. 



-Loeffler, Mittheil. a. d. kais. Gesundheitsamt, 1884. 



3 Loeffler, Cent. f. Bakt., 1887 and 1890. 



*Roux and Yersin, Ann. de 1'inst. Pasteur, 1888 and 1889. 



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