TUBERCLE BACILLUS 



111 



phthisis was or might be infective. So far back as 

 1500, Frascatorius had said that phthisis came " by 

 the gliding of the corrupt and noisome humours of 

 the patient into the lungs of a healthy man." 

 Surely, if clinical experience could suffice, men 

 would have made something out of this wisdom of 

 Frascatorius. They made nothing of it ; they 

 waited three centuries for Villemin to inoculate the 

 rabbits, and then the thing was done — En void les 

 preuves. Three years later, Chauveau produced the 

 disease in animals, not by inoculation, but by the 

 admixture of tuberculous matter with their food. 

 Then, as the work grew, there came a short period 

 of uncertainty : different species of animals are so 

 widely different in their susceptibility to the disease 

 that the results of further inoculations seemed to go 

 against Villemin ; and it was not till 1880 that 

 Cohnheim finally established Villemin's teaching, 

 and even went beyond it, making inoculation the 

 very proof of tubercle : — 



M Everything is tuberculous, that can produce 

 tuberculous disease by inoculation in animals that 

 are susceptible to that disease : and nothing is 

 tuberculous, that cannot do this." 



Then, in 1881, came the welcome news that 

 Koch had discovered the bacillus of tubercle. In 

 his first published account of it (24th March 1882) he 

 says : — 



" Henceforth, in our warfare against this fearful 

 scourge of our race, we have to reckon not with a 

 nameless something, but with a definite parasite, 



