TWENTY-FIVE YEARS OF BACTERIOLOGY 145 



served the icteroides. He examined a series of sections 

 of organs stained by Levaditi's method to show spiral 

 organisms, taken from a patient having yellow fever who 

 succumbed in New Orleans in 1907, and in the kidney 

 found spiral forms to which he gave the name of Spiro- 

 cheta interrogans, but the significance of which could not 

 then be determined, and which Noguchi now identifies as 

 the icteroides. Coming at this time and in this way, the 

 observation is a welcome confirmation. Without the many 

 data since supplied by Noguchi's experiments and studies 

 of living cases of yellow fever, it possesses only sug- 

 gestive value. The finding came too early in the develop- 

 ment of our knowledge of the spirochete, and again the 

 seed fell on stony ground. 



There remains one further aspect of this incomplete 

 discussion of spiral microbes in their relation to disease 

 to be considered briefly, namely their separation into two 

 classes according as the diseases induced by them re- 

 spond to treatment on the one hand by curative serums, 

 and on the other by so-called drugs or chemicals. It has 

 just been stated that yellow fever can be combated by 

 a serum of this kind, and the same is true of infectious 

 jaundice. In this respect the two inciting microbes L. 

 icteroides and 5. ictero-hcemorrhagice behave as do cer- 

 tain bacteria. But the spirochete of syphilis and yaws 

 and some others are not subject to serum influences, and 

 hence they and the disease they induce must be attacked 

 from another quarter, and in this instance with chemicals 

 for which they evince an extraordinary selectiveness, as 

 do the malarial organisms and certain parasitic trypano- 

 somes which are of protozoal nature. 



CHEMOTHERAPY 



Chemotherapy is the name applied to the branch of ex- 

 perimental medicine in which chemicals, or drugs, are 

 searched for, and when necessary and possible, fashioned 



