CHAPTER VII 

 ANTHRAX 



ANTHKAX is essentially a disease of cattle known as splenic 

 fever, and though occurring in England only sporadically, 

 or in small outbreaks, in some parts of the world it assumes 

 serious proportions as in Siberia, where it has been 

 termed the Siberian plague. In France also at one 

 time it ravaged the sheep to such an extent as to 

 threaten them with extinction. Man is also occasionally 

 attacked. 



Anthrax was the first disease to be definitely associated 

 with a specific micro-parasite, for the organism was 

 observed as glassy homogeneous rods and filaments in the 

 blood of infected animals so long ago as 1849 by Pollender 

 and 1850 by Davaine, and the latter also claimed in 1863 

 to have demonstrated by inoculation experiments the 

 causal relation of the organism to the disease. Davaine's 

 experiments were made by inoculating an animal directly 

 with the blood from an infected animal, and were, there- 

 fore, hardly conclusive, as they did not comply with the 

 second and third of Koch's postulates, which declare that 

 the micro-organism must be cultivated outside the body, 

 and the cultivated organism must produce the disease on 

 inoculation, and the objection was raised that infection 

 was due, not to the bacillus, but to something else in the 

 blood. This objection was subsequently removed by the 

 work of Pasteur and of Koch, who obtained pure cultures 

 of the organism, the Bacillus anihracis, and with these 



251 



