NINETEENTH-CENTURY MEDICINE 



Almost at the same time that the Polish medical 

 student was demonstrating the itch mite in Paris, it 

 chanced, curiously enough, that another medical stu- 

 dent, this time an Englishman, made an analogous dis- 

 covery of perhaps even greater importance. Indeed, 

 this English discovery in its initial stages slightly ante- 

 dated the other, for it was in 1833 that the student in 

 question, James Paget, interne in St. Bartholomew's 

 Hospital, London, while dissecting the muscular tissues 

 of a human subject, found little specks of extraneous 

 matter, which, when taken to the professor of com- 

 parative anatomy, Richard Owen, were ascertained, 

 with the aid of the microscope, to be the cocoon of a 

 minute and hitherto unknown insect. Owen named 

 the insect Trichina spiralis. After the discovery was 

 published it transpired that similar specks had been 

 observed by several earlier investigators, but no one 

 had previously suspected or, at any rate, demonstrated 

 their nature. Nor was the full story of the trichina 

 made out for a long time after Owen's discovery. It 

 was not till 1847 that the American anatomist Dr. 

 Joseph Leidy found the cysts of trichina in the tissues 

 of pork; and another decade or so elapsed after that 

 before German workers, chief among whom were 

 Leuckart, Virchow, and Zenker, proved that the para- 

 site gets into the human system through ingestion of 

 infected pork, and that it causes a definite set of symp- 

 toms of disease which hitherto had been mistaken for 

 rheumatism, typhoid fever, and other maladies. Then 

 the medical world was agog for a time over the subject 

 of trichinosis; government inspection of pork was es- 

 tablished in some parts of Germany; American pork 



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