582 Microscopic Organisms in Blood and their Relation to Disease, [part hi. 



for the Medical Officer of the Local Grovernment Board) into the etiology of a disease 

 sometimes described as typhoid fever of the pig, also as hog plague, Tfiol rouge, red 

 soldier and malignant erysipelas. Dr. Klein, however, proposes to show that the disease 

 is not typhoid fever, nor anthrax, but an infectious disease of its own kind, which he 

 proposes to call " infectious pneu mo-enteritis " of the pig (Pneumo-enteritis contagiosa).* 

 The disease appears to present considerable pathological resemblance to septicaemia and 

 to charbon, except that, as regards the latter, the fresh blood does not, as a rule, con- 

 tain any foreign matter, and in most instances does not possess any infectious property. 

 Of five animals inoculated with the fresh blood, one only was affected, but the specimen 

 of blood which produced this retained its activity when closed in a capillary tube for 

 several weeks. The peritoneal exudation, however, always contains the virus in an 

 active state, and solid lymph obtained from such an exudation will, if dried at about 

 38° C, prove active. This accords pretty closely with what has usually been observed 

 in septicaemia. Inoculation can also be effected by means of portions of diseased lung, 

 intestine, or spleen, as also with the frothy sanguinous exudation in the bronchi, and 

 infection may take place when the virus is introduced directly into the stomach. 



It would seem that like organisms were discovered by Leisering some eighteen 

 years ago, in apparently the same affection of the pig as that now described by Dr. 

 Klein. 



Dr. Falke, in referring to the bacilli of splenic-fever, and after alluding to the 

 circumstance that Delafond had been able to induce the disease in other animals by 

 inoculating them with 2Vf'li of a drop of bacillus-blood, states that Leisering, in his 

 Dresden Report for 1860, mentions that it is quite correct that such bacilli are found 

 in the blood in splenic disease, but that he (Leisering) had also found that they were 

 present in four pigs which had suffered from well-marked typhus (abdominalis) with 

 ulcers in the intestines and swelled follicles, f There is no indication here that the 

 bacilli seen by Dr. Leisering in pig-t;yphoid differed in appearance from those which 

 he had seen in charbon ; on the contrary, he seems to assume that they are identical, 

 -and hence questions their being pathognomonic of the latter disease. 



Seven cultivation-experiments were conducted by Dr. Klein of the bacilli observed 

 by him, " to prove that the virus can be cultivated artificially, i.e., outside the body 

 of the animal." Minute portions of peritoneal exudation were added to aqueous humor 



* " Experimental Contribution to the Etiology of Infectioas Diseases with special reference to the Doctrine 

 of Contagium Vivum :" Quarterly Journal of Microscopical Sou^ncc, April 1878, p. 170. 



f "Bericht Uber die Thierarzneiwissenschaft," Schmidt's Jahrbilchcr. Band 114, p. 131. The original is as 

 follows : "Leisering sagt im Dresdner Bericht f. 1860, dass man nach den vorliegenden Beobachtungen mit Recht 

 annehmen konne, dass im Milzbrandblute diese eigenthiimlichen Korperchen stets vorkommen. Er habe jedoch 

 dieselben audi bei vier Schweinen gef unden, welche an ausgepragtem Typhus litten, der mit Darmgeschwiiren 

 geschwelten FoUikeln, blassgraulicher Farbung der Musklen und keiner BlutUberfiillung der Eingeweide 

 einherging."— Cited by Professor Klob in his Pathologisoh-Anatomische Studien iiher das Wescn dvs Cholera- 

 Processes : Leipzig, 1867. 



