^"jo Microscopic Organisfns in Blood and their Relation to Disease, [part hi. 



Pasteur and others, have undoubtedly taken the lead. Probably no single incident 

 has tended so much towards enlisting the attention of the medical profession to it 

 than the publication of the experiments of M. Davaine, which went to show that 

 minute organisms were, to a greater or less degree, constantly present in the 

 blood of animals which had died of the disease known as malignant pustule in man — 

 the '' Milzhrand,''' of Germany ; the " charbon " of cattle and pigs, and " mxd de rate " of 

 sheep, in France. The terms " splenic fever" or " splenic apoplexy," " anthracoid disease," 

 etc., are commonly adopted in England in describing the affection. Birch-Hirschfeld * 

 states that the organisms found in this affection were first described by Brauell 

 in 1849 and by Pollender in 1857 ; but, undoubtedly, it was M. Davaine's researches 

 which were the means of drawing serious public attention to the matter. In August 

 1850 M. Davaine, in conjunction with M. Eayer, published an account of these 

 organisms, describing them as minute filamentous bodies, motionless, and about 

 double the length of the diameter of a red blood-corpuscle. M. Pasteur f maintains 

 that the time just mentioned represents the date of the first publication of the 

 existence of these bodies in charbon, but this idea is manifestly erroneous. 



Instigated thereto by the publication of M. Pasteur's researches (which went to 

 show that butyric fermentation was not, as believed, due to an albuminoid body in 

 process of spontaneous decomposition, but to vibriones, which presented the greatest 

 resemblance to the " corps filiformes," found in the blood of animals dying of charbon) 

 M. Davaine returned to the subject in 1863 and 1864. The organisms were at first 

 considered by M. Davaine to be bacteria ; but finding in certain cases that the 

 filaments or rods varied in length, he modified the name, and they have 

 consequently been, until lately, commonly designated bacteridia. At this period 

 it was supposed that they were more closely related to animals than to plants. He 

 satisfied himself that they were found in the blood during life; that they developed 

 in this fluid and not iii the spleen ; in fact, he had been able to transfer the 

 organisms to animals whose spleen had been removed. He also ascertained that 

 bacteridia are not found in foetal blood, although the blood of the mother and of the 

 placenta was crowded with them.| The disease was found to be communicable with 

 the food by mixing with it some of the tissues of diseased animals ; the effects 

 were less rapily induced, but the blood became equally affected with bacteridia. He 

 refuses to accept the doctrine of identity of the poison of septicaemia and charbon, 

 on the grounds (1) that the symptoms produced by inoculating animals with 

 putrefying blood are not constantly the same, and that bacteridia do not develop 

 in the circulation of the affected animal ; (2) that animals which have swallowed 

 fragments of putrefied tissue rarely died ; and (3) that animals which had swallowed 

 fragments of the fresh tissues of animals which had died of septicaamia had been in 



* Schmidt's Jahrhiicher der genammten mediein, Band 166, S. 205, 1875. 



f Etude sur la maladie charbonneuse ; par MM. Pasteur et Joubert. Compten Jfendvs. t. Ixxxiv, p. 900, 1877. 



X Compter Rendus, t. lix, p. 393, 1864. 



