﻿428 STRONG. 



extracted from 12 oeseii gave rise to far better sera. A much larger 

 dose than -J oese of the living organisms could not have been resisted by 

 the animals, as they would have succumbed to an infection with the 

 spirillum. 



LOCAL REACTION FOLLOWING INOCULATION. 



Several of the observers who. have used in man the method of injecting 

 extracts obtained by autolysis remark upon the fact that the local re- 

 action is less marked than in the case of the inoculation of "either the 

 killed or living spirilla. There can be no doubt of this fact and we 

 have had opportunity to compare the reaction produced by each of these 

 methods in man as well as in animals. In animals the differences 

 are very striking and may easily be observed. If a guinea pig is in- 

 oculated in the abdominal cavity and tissues overlying the abdominal 

 wall with -J oese of a virulent cholera organism of which the lethal 

 dose is about 1/10 of an oese, or with 5 or 6 oesen of the same killed 

 organism, at autopsy in the neighborhood of the track of the syringe 

 needle there is found a haemorrhagic and infiltrated area which is 

 usually sharply circumscribed and of a bright or dark red color. If, on 

 the other hand, a guinea pig is inoculated with a large dose — for example, 

 5 cubic centimeters — of the extracted prophylactic I have described, the 

 animal may succiimb to the injection from intoxication, but at autopsy 

 no hsemorrhagic area will be observed about the point of inoculation. 

 The walls of the abdomen are swollen and cedematous, but there are no 

 evidences of an acute, inflammatory process such as occurs when the 

 living or killed organism itself is inoculated. On the other hand, if 

 inoculations in amounts just below the lethal dose are made with each 

 form of prophylactic, no difference in the quality of the immunity can 

 be detected in the two animals, variation only being found in relation 

 to the quantity of the amboceptors : the animals inoculated with a large 

 amount of the prophylactic yielding a better serum than those which had 

 been given the living organisms. 



Therefore, it seems unquestionable that there are other irritating sub- 

 stances in the cell of the cholera organism which have nothing to do 

 with the production of the immunity, and it is these substances which 

 may be separated to a large extent from the immunizing antigens by 

 autolysis. 



The action of these irritating substances in the cholera cell seems to 

 be particularly active when a large amount of the organism in con- 

 centrated suspension is introduced into the tissues ; thus, in deaths from 

 Asiatic cholera we do not see markedly hsemorrhagic areas in the 

 intestinal wall where the organisms are spread out over the surface of 

 the mucosa, but if several oesen of the living organisms are introduced 

 into the subcutaneous tissues in man, the hsemorrhagic condition may 

 be produced, as I have demonstrated by an experiment performed upon 



