22Q BACTERIA. 



period of five days in one of the ventilating shafts of the 

 Brompton Hospital for Consumption. Washing off the 

 glycerine "with distilled water, the fluid was mixed with a little 

 mucilage and evaporated down to one-half, and then examined 

 for the bacilli," and in this he was able to demonstrate bacilli 

 in fair numbers. In a thoroughly purified ward a number 

 of non-phthisical patients were placed, with the result that 

 no bacilli were found in the air carried off by the extraction 

 shaft ; whilst in another ward, filled with consumptive 

 patients, the washings from a plate exposed for fourteen 

 days in the extraction shaft contained numerous bacilli. 

 Similar experiments have been made by other observers, but it 

 was left for Cornet to make a systematic examination of the 

 dust in rooms were phthisical and non-phthisical patients 

 were treated. By numerous careful inoculation experiments, 

 he demonstrated the fact that the expectorations from 

 phthisical patients are a source of a very real and appreci- 

 able danger. The bacilli are not only exhaled, in small 

 numbers no doubt, but he finds that they are also con- 

 tained in very considerable numbers in the dried sputum 

 obtained from handkerchiefs, bed linen used by phthisical 

 patients, and in the sputum that has made its way on to the 

 floor and walls through the dirty habits of many of the 

 patients. His experiments extended over a very considerable 

 period, and to the rooms of private patients in hospitals, in 

 lunatic asylums, &c. ; he even found bacilli in the streets 

 and open spaces in a certain proportion of cases where 

 tuberculous patients were collected together. These results 

 have the greater value from the fact that in no case did he 

 consider his experiments complete unless the dust with 

 which he was experimenting, when inoculated into animals, 

 produced the disease. It follows from all this that infection, 

 as the result of inhalation of the dried virus, is one of the 

 most common forms with which we have to contend, this 

 being especially the case in older people, amongst whom 

 pulmonary tuberculosis is most commonly met with, but in 

 whom, as in children, pulmonary catarrh seems invariably to 

 precede the tubercular disease. In children, the catarrhal 

 inflammation of the lungs that so frequently accompanies 

 such conditions as measles, scarlatina, diphtheria, whooping- 

 cough, and other similar conditions, may very frequently 

 become tubercular in character. 



