FIRST EXPERIMENT ON A CALF. 459 



ing to the reports of ancient and modern travellers, and particularly 

 of Davaine in 1860, owe the parasite to their use of the raw flesh 

 of sheep and oxen. This fact of course suggests that one of these 

 animals must be the intermediate host of this Taenia, and that the 

 more certainly from the report of the army surgeon Knox,^ who, 

 during the first Kaf&r war in soutli Africa, witnessed the outbreak of 

 a tape-worm epidemic among the soldiers after they had fed for 

 a lengthened period on " overdriven and unsound " oxen. The South 

 African tape-worm proved from specimens sent me to be really Tmnia 

 saginata. 



To this must be added a statement of Weisse in St. Petersburg,* 

 according to whom this common worm not unfrequently occurs in 

 children who have been fed on raw beef for dietetic reasons. This 

 result has been repeatedly confirmed in Germany, and the worm in 

 question is always T. saginata, as I first proved from the examination 

 of a case with which I was made acquainted through Dr. Harnier of 

 Cassel. The case mentioned was all the more interesting since it 

 concerned a Jewish child two years of age, belonging to a family in 

 Wiirzburg, who lived in strict observance of the law. 



Guided by these considerations, I determined to experiment on 

 the ox at the earliest opportunity. Huber '■^ and Schmidt had already 

 noted the probability of this animal being the intermediate host of 

 T. saginata.*' The latter spoke to me especially of a case where the 

 existence of the parasite could be traced with some certainty to the 

 eating of a meat salad made of raw beef. 



The opportunity was soon forthcoming, thanks to the courtesy 

 and sympathy which I have so often experienced from Dr. Schmidt. 

 On the 13th November 1861, when the first edition of my work had 

 been for a long time in the printers' hands, I gave about a yard of 

 some eighty ripe joints of Tmnia saginata to a calf four weeks old, 

 and eight days later I repeated the feeding with a smaller dose. 



The animal experimented on seemed so slightly affected by my 

 experiment, that I was about to extract a muscle, as I was wont to do 

 in such cases, when on the 9th December (i.e., twenty-five and 

 seventeen days after the first and second feedings respectively) my 



' Froriep't Notizen, p. 122, 1822. 



" Journal f. Kinderkrankheiien, Bd. xvi., p. 384, 1857. 



° Bericht xiii. des naturhist. Vereins, Augsburg, p. 127, 1860. 



* Kiichenmeister claims priority in this supposition ("Parasiten," 2d ed., p. 149). 

 In the English translation of his text-book (p. 139), published in 1857, he says— "The 

 toolex was either seated in the beef or in moUusks, which might have been in the salad 

 or in the radishes." Apart from the fact that the association of beef and molluscs shows 

 how uncertain was his supposition, it must have been speedily abandoned, for we recall 

 his alleged discovery (in I860) of the cystic form of Tania saginata in the flesh of the pig. 



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