424 PRINCIPLES OF VETERINARY SURGERY 



BACTERIOLOGY.— The infectious nature of tetanus 

 was suspected long before the discovery of the specific mi- 

 cro-organism. The discovery was assisted by work that 

 is interesting to recall : B. Travers, Rose, Banum and Bill- 

 roth considered tetanus a special intoxication. The first 

 experimenters tried to transmit tetanus but failed. Arloing 

 and Tripier failed to transmit tetanus to the dog, the rab- 

 bit and the horse by venous inoculations of blood and pus 

 taken from a tetanus patient twenty-fours after death, and 

 by the injection of 200 grams of blood of a horse affected 

 with the disease into the jugular vein of_ a healthy horse. 

 ' Billroth and Anthona failed to transmit the disease by in- 

 jecting the blood of tetanic subjects into healthy animals, 

 and Nocard likewise obtained negative results from intra- 

 arachnoidean, peritoneal, venous and subcutaneous inocu- 

 lations of cephalo-arachnoidean liquid or bulbar substance 

 taken from a horse that had died from tetanus. 



These experiments did not demonstrate, as some writers 

 thoug-ht, "that tetanus is not an infectious disease," but 

 that the virus is not in the products used for inoculation. 

 Carle and Rattone in 1884 were the first to transmit teta- 

 nus by inoculation. An animal having died from tetanus 

 caused by scraping a pustule of acne, the pustule and its 

 surrounding tissues were excised and made into an emulsion, 

 which was injected into the sheaths of the sciatic ner\"es 

 of rabbits. Out of a dozen rabbits inoculated eleven pre- 

 sented symptoms of tetanus. Fragments of tissue taken 

 from the inoculated places on the rabbits that died were 

 inoculated into other rabbits, with fatal results from teta- 

 nus. The infectious nature of the disease was thus dem- 

 onstrated, but the specific micro-organism remained to be 

 found. This discovery was made by Nicolaier in 1884. 

 While studying the pathogenic micro-organisms of the soil 

 at Gottingen he inoculated white mice, cavies, and rabbits 



