r/. B. WARD, M. D. 201 



many cases of undoubted phthisis where the general 

 health is for a long time unimpaired. Then there comes 

 a little fever, a little flush of the face, a trifling falling 

 off of strength and weight. What has happened ? The 

 bacilli have been all along manufacturing this poison — a 

 ptomaine or a toxin, but not in so large a quantity but 

 the system could eliminate it. But the time has arrived 

 when the quantity of the toxin is too great for the system 

 to get rid of and the symptoms appear. Then the poison 

 having the upper hand it is only a question of time be- 

 fore the microscopic demon claims its own. The pto- 

 maines of tubercle act as a slow poison but some of the 

 others are exceedingly virulent and powerful, indeed as 

 powerful for evil as any poisons known. 



Roux and Yersin have found that one-fifth of a milli- 

 gramme of the ptomaine of diphtheria obtained from 

 pure cultures of the bacillus discovered by Klebs and 

 Lofiler is capable of killing eight guinea pigs or two 

 rabbits. This quantity is only 3^0 of a grain. While 

 Bryer and Cohn killed a mouse with ^^ of a milli- 

 gramme (gjsjjjj of a grain) of the ptomaine of tetanus. 

 No snake venom will compare with this. I remember 

 hearing the elder Austin Flint, in a clinic in Bellevue 

 Hospital in 1875, announce his belief that pneumonia is 

 an infectious disease, to be classed among the fevers and 

 not among the inflammations. Of course in those days 

 nothing was known of the bacterial origin of any disease, 

 and the professor based his opinion on chemical grounds 

 alone. In the next edition of his book on the Practice 

 of Medicine, I believe, he called the disease pneumonic 

 fever and placed it with the infectious diseases. I sup- 

 pose the most of the profession at that time thought that 

 the learned x>rofessor had a tile loose or was in his do- 

 tage, but time has demonstrated that he was right (and 

 he generally was right, by the way), and we can inject 

 cultures of the dipiococcus of pneumonia into that fa- 



139 



