30 



Scientific Proceedings (102). 



per 100 c.c. of blood. Lactose shows only a very slight rise, 4 

 milligrams, and that at the end of the second hour, as was the 

 case with the other disachrade, cane sugar. I have been unable 

 to consult the literature and so will offer the figures for what they 

 are worth. 



18 (1478) 



The bacteriology of infectious gaseous gangrene. 

 By Marshall C. Pease. 



[From the New York Post-Graduate Medical School.] 



Infectious gaseous gangrene can no longer be conceived of as 

 being necessarily a monomicrobic disease. On the contrary it is 

 frequently the result of an association of bacteria, not all of which 

 are by themselves pathogenic or even under the most favorable 

 condition of animal inoculation capable of causing a pathological 

 lesion. The causative agents of infectious gaseous gangrene are 

 found in a certain group of anaerobes, all of which are capable of 

 elaborating a powerful toxin which has not only a local but also 

 a systemic action. Death in gaseous gangrene is not the direct 

 result of the local lesion but of the absorption of toxin into the 

 general circulation with a consequent general toxemia. 



The spread of the local lesion is dependent upon local tissue 

 necrosis. The tissue necrosis in turn is dependent upon the 

 elaboration of bacterial toxins, which are distributed along the 

 line of the muscle sheaths and facia, and through the lymph 

 spaces. There is no evidence that the toxin producing the local 

 tissue necrosis differs from the toxin which is the cause of the 

 general toxemia. If for any reason toxins are not elaborated 

 within the wound or are not absorbed from the wound a gaseous 

 gangrene does not develop despite the fact that there may be 

 within the wound a large number of potentially pathogenic 

 anaerobes. 



All the aerobes can be dismissed as a cause of infectious 

 gaseous gangrene. Any effects which they produce are in the 

 nature of a complication. At the most their role in this disease 

 process is confined to the absorption of oxygen, the turning upon 



