§ XIII.] Asiatic cholera. 159 



less common than tuberculosis ; their secretions are scattered 

 about and the Gonococcus with them. If the Gonococcus were 

 capable of saprophytic vegetation under ordinary natural con- 

 ditions, it is hardly to be supposed that infection would not 

 sometimes take place in some other way than from one person 

 to another. This, however, notwithstanding some quite doubtful 

 and isolated accounts, is not the case. 



5. Asiatic cholera (75) may now be very fairly reckoned 

 among the comparatively well-known infectious diseases, which' 

 we are at present considering. As early as the beginning of 

 the year 1850, Pacini believed that he had found a contagium 

 vivum of this disorder in the Bacteria, or Vibrios as he terms 

 them, which he observed in the intestinal canal and its evacua- 

 tions. Some time after (1867) Klob examined the contents of 

 the intestinal canal, and the evacuations of patients suffering 

 from Asiatic cholera, and likewise found Bacteria present in 

 them in considerable quantities ; and starting with the assump- 

 tion that these organisms are instruments of decomposition, he 

 showed it to be probable that these Bacteria set up the disease 

 in the intestinal canal, and spread it from thence to other parts 

 of the body. Our knowledge of the Bacteria had not then 

 reached the point at which attempts could be made to dis- 

 tinguish more precisely between the various forms found in the 

 intestine and in the dejecta and to separate them from one 

 another. The absurd notion, entertained in other quarters be- 

 tween the years i860 and 1870, of referring the cholera-con- 

 tagium. Bacteria included, to ordinary moulds and hypothetical 

 parasites of the rice-plant, and the fact that Bacteria apparently 

 quite similar to those of Klob were found in the intestinal canal 

 of persons who were not suffering from cholera, had the effect 

 of withdrawing attention once more from these and other efforts 

 to discover the contagium vivum of this disease. In India, 

 the perennial home of the pestilence, the researches conducted 

 at a later time by English physicians gave no certain and positive 

 results. 



