NICOLAIER 



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vate it by ordinary methods failed again and again. 

 It had to be cultivated below the surface of certain 

 nutrient media, or in a special atmosphere of nitrogen 

 or hydrogen. 



These and other difficulties for many years 

 delayed the final proof of the true pathology of 

 tetanus. The success of the work was mainly due 

 to Nicolaier. He started from the well-known fact 

 that tetanus mostly comes of wounds or scratches 

 contaminated with particles of earth — such mis- 

 chances as the grinding of dirt or gravel into the 

 skin, or the tearing of it by a splinter of wood or a 

 rusty nail ; as Dr Poore says, in his Milroy Lectures 

 (1899), " Every child who falls on the ground and 

 gets an abrasion of the skin, all tillers of the soil 

 who get accidental wounds in the course of duty, 

 and every horse which ' breaks its knees ' by falling 

 in the London streets, runs potentially a risk of 

 inoculation with tetanus." Nicolaier therefore 

 studied the various microbes of the soil, and made 

 inoculations of garden-mould under the skin of 

 rabbits. He was able, by these inoculations, to 

 produce tetanus in them ; and the discharge from 

 the points of inoculation, put under the skin of 

 other rabbits, produced the disease again. He also 

 identified the bacillus, and cultivated it ; but in 

 these cultures it was mixed with other organisms, 

 and he failed to isolate it from them. Carle and 

 Rattone, and Rosenbach, were able to produce 

 tetanus in animals by inoculating them with dis- 

 charge from the wounds of patients attacked by 

 the disease. Finally, Kitasato, in 1889, found a 



