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LOUIS PASTEUR 



Interpretation of the disease and of the death. The injury 

 of the uterus during confinement as usual furnished pus, 

 which gave a lodging place for the germs of the long chains 

 of granules. These, probably through the lymphatics, passed 

 to the joints and to some other places, thus being the origin 

 of the metastic abscesses which produced death. 



Fifth observation. On June seventeenth, M. Doleris, a 

 well-known hospital interne, brought to me some blood, 

 removed with the necessary precautions, from a child dead 

 immediately after birth, whose mother, before confinement 

 had had febrile symptoms with chills. This blood, upon cul- 

 tivation, gave an abundance of the pyogenic vibrio. On the 

 other hand, blood taken from the mother on the morning of 

 the eighteenth (she had died at one o'clock that morning) 

 showed no development whatever, on the nineteenth nor on 

 following days. The autopsy on the mother took place on 

 the nineteenth. It is certainly worthy of note that the uterus, 

 peritoneum and intestines showed nothing special, but the 

 liver was full of metastatic abscesses. At the exit of the 

 hepatic vein from the liver there was pus, and its walls were 

 ulcerated at this place. The pus from the liver abscesses 

 was filled with the pyogenic vibrio. Even the liver tissues, 

 at a distance from the visible abscesses, gave abundant cul- 

 tures of the same organism. 



Interpretation of the disease and of the death. The 

 pyogenic vibrio, found in the uterus, or which was perhaps 

 already in the body of the mother, since she suffered from 

 chills before confinement, produced metastatic abscesses in 

 the liver and, carried to the blood of the child, there induced 

 one of the forms of infection called purulent, which caused 

 its death. 



Sixth observation. The eighteenth of June, 1879, M. 

 Doleris informed me that a woman confined some days 

 before at the Cochin Hospital, was very ill. On the twen- 

 tieth of June, blood from a needle-prick in the finger was 

 sowed; the culture was sterile. On July fifteenth, that is 

 to say twenty-five days later, the blood was tried again. 

 Still no growth. There was no organism distinctly recog- 

 nizable in the lochia: the woman was nevertheless, they 

 told me, dangerously ill and at the point of death. As a 



