AKTIFICIAL SEPTICAEMIA IN ANIMALS. 115 



inflammatory oedema, extending in all directions from the point 

 of injection, attendant with an abundant exudation of bloody 

 serum swarming with micrococci. Hemorrhagic extravasations in 

 the connective tissue and in various organs were of frequent occur- 

 rence, and changes in the liver and spleen such as are common to 

 quickly fatal septic diseases, were commonly found. The disease 

 could be communicated by dipping a hypodermic needle in the 

 blood of a rabbit just dead as the result of an injection of saliva 

 and inoculating a healthy rabbit ; a rapidly-fatal septicaemia was 

 produced. Ogston states that in cases of septicaemia in man, micro- 

 cocci are present in the blood and are excreted in a living state 

 in the urine. This statement has been confirmed by Eiselsberg, 

 who examined the blood of almost all cases in Billroth's clinic 

 which were suffering from septic fever, and was able to demon- 

 strate the presence of staphylococci and streptococci, most fre- 

 quently of staphylococcus pyogenes albus, in the blood, and yet 

 apparently no abscesses formed. 



Smith (Annals of Gynecology , vol. ii. No. 12) isolated and culti- 

 vated from two cases of puerperal sepsis a streptococcus which by 

 inoculation and cultivation experiments differed from the strepto- 

 coccus of Fehleisen and the ordinary streptococcus of suppuration. 

 He made a series of gelatin cultures with blood taken from the 

 heart. After an interval of two or three days many colonies 

 appeared. Eats inoculated with a pure culture died in three or 

 four days, the microbe being found in their blood. Inoculations 

 were also made in the ears of rabbits, and at the end of twenty-four 

 hours a circumscribed redness without tendency to diffusion was 

 apparent, the redness disappearing in two or three days. Another 

 series of cultures and inoculations was made with blood taken 

 from the finger of a woman sick with puerperal fever, and this 

 produced similar results. 



Dowdeswell (" Report on Experimental Investigations on the 

 Intimate Nature -of the Contagion in certain Acute Infective 

 Diseases,' 7 British Medical Journal, July 19, 1884) has made 

 numerous experiments to determine the nature of Davaine's sep- 

 ticaemia of rabbits and Pasteur's septicaemia of guinea-pigs. 

 The former were made by injecting subcutaneously five drops of 

 putrid ox-blood. If infection was produced, -which was generally 

 the case, death followed within forty hours ; characteristic textural 

 changes in organs were not found. One drop of blood from 

 infected animals caused the death of a second animal. Blood from 

 the secqud animal, diluted from 10 to 100,000 times, produced a 

 fatal effect in from twenty- four to twenty-seven hours. Blood from 

 the sixth generation was diluted ten million times, and still produced 

 a fatal sepsis on being injected subcutaueously ; while a drop 



