SCIENCE LETTER FROM PARIS. 47 



CORRESPONDENCE. 



SCIENCE LETTER FROM PARIS. 



Paris, March 12. 

 Periodically the trichina disease is notified as existing in the country ; the 

 fact is, the malady is as old as the hills, only within the last forty years it has re- 

 ceived a new name. Its effects have been less baneful in France than in Ger- 

 many, Italy or Switzerland, because, in this country, pork is more thoroughly 

 cooked and the parasites thereby destroyed. Where illness or death has followed 

 the consumption of trichinous pork, the latter invariably turned out to have been 

 imperfectly cooked. The Germans, in 1840, called the disease Schinkengift, or 

 ham poison, and Wurstgifi, or sausage poison. The poison was simply trichinae, 

 discovered in 1835 by Ouen, and more popularly made known by Virchow. It 

 was in 1851 that the public became alarmed, in consequence of several persons 

 having died in tlie neighborhood of Hamburg after eating ham. In 1863, M. 

 Langenbeck, of Berlin, while performing an operation — the removal of a tumor 

 — discovered the patient's flesh to be alive with the animalcules : on being ques- 

 tioned, the patient admitted that he had been served with poisoned pork by an 

 inn keeper, who, to avoid prosecution, had fled to America, perfectly uncon- 

 scious of having committed any crime. The real criminal was the trichina. The 

 Utter is a worm, and can be found -in man, cats, crows, vultures, rats, mice and 

 moles, as well as in the pig. It exists in a little bladder-like vessel called a 

 cyst, in the muscles, and by that channel is absorbed by us, resembling little 

 white corpuscules, or pimples; magnified to 300 times its size, it resembles a 

 small worm coiled up on itself. In the cyst the worm remains inert, but once in 

 the intestinal canal, it becomes animated. The female is viviparous, and lays 

 more than 1,000 embryos at a time, and can continue doing so during seven or 

 eight weeks; these embryos, by t\\e\x very smallness — for they have no perforat- 

 ing organs — pass through the membrane of the intestine, enter everywhere — into 

 the very blood itself. When the worm finds a muscle suitable it develops itself 

 rapidly, taking, after nineteen days, the form of larva. Here its role — its exist- 

 ence, ends; it forms a cyst at the expense of the muscle. The worm dies and 

 passes off with other matters by the intestines. The diseased muscle, if 

 eaten by an animal, will in due time yield up its worm, liberated by the gastric 

 juice of the stomach, and so recommence its role of propagation. The intensity 

 of the symptoms of the disease varies with the temperament of the individual, 

 and the number of trichinae absorbed; three days suffice for the incubation of the 

 latter, when the patient commences to lose appetite, to feel vaguely out of sorts, 

 to experience nausea and an ardent thirst ; the lassitude increases, the features 

 become swollen, and, as the animalcules emigrate among the muscles, the pain 



