CHAPTEK XI 



PYAEMIA. 



THE presence of pyaemia in over-crowded and badly-ventilated 

 hospitals during the time before the antiseptic treatment of wounds 

 came into use, gave rise to the general belief that the disease was 

 due to a specific cause, and ever since bacteriology became a science 

 diligent search has been made to demonstrate its specific microbic 

 origin. Since the discovery of the microbes of suppuration, new 

 light has been shed upon the etiology and pathology of this disease. 

 Bacteriological studies of pyaemic products have shown that one or 

 more kinds of pus-microbes are always present, thus establishing 

 the direct relationship between a suppurating process in some part 

 of the body, and the development of metastatic or pyaemic abscesses. 

 Clinical experience has only corroborated the scientific investiga- 

 tions of this subject, inasmuch as it has shown that the frequency 

 of its occurrence has been diminished in proportion to the lessening 

 of suppurative inflammation in wounds under the antiseptic man- 

 agement of traumatic injuries and internal suppurating lesions. 

 We are justified upon the basis of well-established facts in claiming 

 that pyaemia is not a disease per se, but that its occurrence depends 

 upon an extension of a suppurative process from the primary seat 

 of infection, and suppuration in distant organs by the transporta- 

 tion of emboli infected with pus-microbes through the systemic 

 circulation. The distant, or metastatic abscesses contain the same 

 microbes which are found in the wound secretions or the abscess 

 from which the general purulent infection took place. Experiments 

 have shown that a culture of pus-microbes from a furuncle may 

 produce pyaemia in animals, and that the microbes cultivated from 

 a pyaemic abscess when injected under the skin of an animal cause 

 only a localized suppurative inflammation without any general 

 symptoms. 



Artificial Production of Pycemia in Animals. 



Koch (Untersuchungen ilber die Aetiologie der Wund infections 

 Krankheiten, Leipzig, 1878) produced typical pyaemia in rabbits 

 by injecting a putrid fluid, obtained by maceration of the ear of a 

 mouse, into the subcutaneous connective-tissue in the inguinal 



