Contagion Through Attendants. 25 



patients, lay with them in the same beds, and even drank 

 their blood with impunity. The results did not prove 

 that cholera was non-virulent, but only that they did not 

 furnish the conditions necessary to induce contagion. 

 We now know that if they had experimented with the 

 bowel dejections of cholera patients cholera would have 

 been produced, in all susceptible subjects, on given days 

 after their passage. 



It seems highly probable that a flaw no less serious 

 entered into the experiments conducted at the Brown In- 

 stitution. If the emanations from the lungs of a sick 

 animal can infect a healthy cow at the farther end of a 

 long stable, there seems no good reason to conclude that 

 the fresh lungs, warm from the sick beast, cannot give 

 off emanations virulent to any susceptible animal. This 

 question of the susceptibility of the healthy animals exposed 

 is the first that suggests itself; and in the report of 

 the experiments in question there is not a hint that 

 this susceptibility had been tested. Had the animals 

 that resisted exposure to the diseased lungs been after- 

 wards infected by contact with sich cattle, the claim that 

 the lungs could not convey the disease after their removal 

 from the body would have been rendered much more 

 plausible. At present, the thousand cases of the convey- 

 ance of the virus through the air of a stable must be held 

 as more authoritative than the three negative results 

 from the diseased lungs at Brown Institution. 



B. Contagion by Pulmonary Exudation Introduced into 

 the Nose. — Prof. Baldwin, of Glasnevin, informs me that, 

 many years ago, he soaked a sponge in the liquid from a 

 diseased lung and stuffed it into the nostril of a sound 

 animal, which, in due time, showed all the symptoms of 

 the lung fever. 



C. Contagion Carried by Attendants. — As this has been 

 warmly debated on the other side of the Atlantic, I shall 

 record three cases which ought of themselves to settle 

 the question. 



