Infections of the Ovum, Embryo and Fetus 499 



serted they had experimentally caused abortion. Nocard 

 had made no such claim for his investigations. Chiefly, if 

 not wholly upon this ground, his work was practically ig- 

 nored. It was everywhere demanded that, ere any given in- 

 fection might be accepted as a cause, or the cause, of abor- 

 tion, its power to cause abortion must be clearly demon- 

 strated experimentally. 



(2) The nodular venereal disease of Isepponi. 1 In 1887, 

 Isepponi, then Canton veterinarian in Chur, published the 

 results of his clinical studies of the hitherto undescribed in- 

 fectious vaginitis which he thought a new and rapidly 

 spreading contagion, and which he believed to be the cause 

 of the serious sterility and abortion in the cattle of his dis- 

 trict. For reasons which seem to me ample, I have placed 

 this among the specific venereal diseases in Chapter XII, 

 where it is discussed at length. 



(3) The Bacterium Abortus of Bang. 



In 1896, Bang and Stribolt discovered in the uterus of a 

 cow, destroyed in the act of abortion, a small Gram-negative 

 bacterium which they succeeded in cultivating in gelatin- 

 agar serum. The finding of the bacterium in large numbers 

 in the utero-chorionic space and in the fetal cadaver justi- 

 fied! a suspicion that it had to do with the abortion. Bang 

 inoculated seven cows with pure cultures of the organism. 

 Prior to inoculating them, he did not learn whether they 

 would or would not probably abort if left alone, and he did 

 not know, and had no means of learning, whether they al- 

 ready had the bacterium in their uteri. They were presum- 

 ably taken from their normal habitat and placed under ex- 

 perimental conditions favorable to abortion, closely guarded, 

 so that the expulsion of a fetal cadaver would almost cer- 

 tainly be seen. One (14 per cent.) of the seven cows 

 aborted, which rate is no higher than would be expected 

 without inoculation. Her uterus contained a bacterium not 

 differentiable from the one used for inoculation. 



'Beitrage z. d. Ursach. d. Unfruchtbarkeit d. Kiihe. Schw. Archiv. 

 fur Tierheilkunde, 1887. 



