INFECTIONS OF THE DIGESTIVE TRACT 159 



While colon bacilli possess in a marked degree certain 

 commonplace properties such as the ability to coagulate 

 milk, to reduce neutral red, to make indol, and to ferment 

 sugars, with the liberation of gas and acids, these prop- 

 erties have been lost in the case of the typhoid bacilli, 

 excepting only the capacity to form acid from sugars. 

 In respect to these characters, the paracolon and para- 

 typhoid bacilli occupy an intermediate position. The 

 loss of these relatively banal properties has been asso- 

 ciated with the development of pathogenic properties 

 for man properties which are doubtless dependent 

 on substances chemically well defined but at present 

 quite unknown. It has, for several years, been recog- 

 nized by students of immunity that in respect to the 

 formation of these toxic substances there is a striking 

 inconsistency in the behavior of the typhoid bacilli 

 in the body and in artificial culture media; for in the 

 former case, while they make poisons oftefi sufficiently 

 active to kill, in the latter only feeble poisons are obtain- 

 able. In partial explanation of this the view was ad- 

 vanced that, unlike the bacilli of diphtheria, which make 



it as a hog-cholera variant or even as an extreme modification of 

 B. coli. Its active motility, however, places it nearest to the 

 typhoid or paratyphoid groups. Brion and Kayser ("Die nosolo- 

 gische Stellung des Symptomkomplexes 'Abdominaltyphus,'" 

 Deutsches Archiv /. klin. Med., Ixxxv, p. 552, 1905-06) have de- 

 scribed an organism differing distinctly from typhoid bacillus, 

 but which was obtained from a patient showing a fever clinically 

 resembling a mild typhoid. From the blood of this patient an 

 organism was cultivated which agglutinated with the patient's 

 serum in a dilution of 1 : 500. It had the property of liquefying 

 gelatin and formed yellow colonies. They gave to it the name 

 of Bacterium flavosepticum. 



