TO BE DUE TO SPECIFIC MICROORGANISMS. 



523 



At the meeting of the Tenth International Medical Congress in Berlin 

 (1890), Babes reported that in the Pasteur Institute at Bucharest about three 

 hundred persons are inoculated yearly, with a mortality of 0.4 per cent, in 

 cases bitten by dogs, most of which were demonstrated to have been rabid 

 by inoculation experiments made at the Institute. 



The recent researches of Tizzoni and Schwartz (1892) show that 

 the blood of rabbits which have an artificial immunity against ra- 

 bies contains an antitoxine which has the power of neutralizing the 

 virus of rabies, either in a test tube or in the body of an inoculated 

 animal. Their experiments indicate the possibility of curing rabies 

 in man by subcutaneous inoculations of this antitoxine extracted 

 from the blood serum of immune rabbits. 



ICTERUS. 



Karlinsky (1890), in a series of. five cases of " infectious icterus " attended 

 with fever, found in the blood, during the height of the attack, curved 

 bacilli from two to six long and one-third to one /< broad, which were readily 

 stained by the usual aniline colors, but not by Gram's method. These he 

 did not succeed in cultivating in any of the culture media usually employed. 



Ducamp (1890) has also given an account of a " slight epidemic of infec- 

 tious icterus," which he supposes to have been due to microorganisms. 



LEPROSY. 



No satisfactory experimental demonstration that the Bacillus 

 leprse is the cause of the disease with which it is associated has yet 

 been made ; but there is very little doubt among bacteriologists and 

 pathologists that such is the case. For the facts relating to its pre- 

 sence in leprous tissues, its morphology, etc. , the reader is referred 

 to the descriptive account of Bacillus leprae (No. 53, page 394). 



MALARIA. 



Klebs and Tommasi-Crudeli, as a result of researches made by them in 

 the vicinity of Rome (1879), announced the discovery of a bacillus which 

 they supposed to be the cause of malarial fevers their Bacillus mala- 

 ria?. The writer repeated their experiments the following year (1880) in the 

 vicinity of New Orleans, and reported as follows : 



' ' Among the organisms found upon the surface of swamp mud near 

 New Orleans, and in the gutters within the city limits, are some which 

 closely resemble, and perhaps are identical with, the Bacillus malariae of 



