BACILLUS ENTERITIDIS OF KLEIN 
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from tube a were inoculated into a guinea-pig of 415 grammes, and 2-25 cubic 
centimetres from tube b into a guinea-pig of 465 grammes ; both animals were 
previously shaved. Next day the second guinea-pig was dead with the usual oedema ; 
while the enteritidis-containing fluid was freely escaping through the punctured 
skin of the first, which recovered with slight necrosis. Thus the apparent difference 
in the virulence of two similar cultures from the same material was almost certainly 
due to the accidental enlargement of the inoculation puncture in the case of one 
guinea-pig : an accident more prone to occur when the animal has been shaved. 
It has been shewn that enteritidis spores were isolated in ten out of twenty- 
four samples of diarrhoea evacuations from different patients, one only having 
symptoms of intestinal irritation. In five the virulence was normal, and in two 
diminished, while three were pathogenic, but not fatal. The spores were also 
demonstrated in the normal evacuations of eleven out of thirteen persons ; they 
were of normal virulence in four cases, diminished in two, and pathogenic in five. 
Apparently the bacillus of Botkin was present in two samples of diarrhoeal 
and two of normal stools. 
Lastly, the normal evacuations of the same healthy individual were examined 
on ten occasions at intervals of weeks or months, and enteritidis-like cultures 
were invariably obtained. Four such cultures were tested by inoculation, in three 
the virulence was normal, and in one diminished. 
The spores were isolated in a larger percentage of normal than of diarrhoeal 
stools, because in the former the quantity tested was relatively larger than in the 
latter. The virulence was often subnormal, partly because the site of the inoculation 
was shaved. 
Occasionally the milk cultures were ' atypical.' Such were not inoculated, 
but they are, according to Klein, of diminished virulence or non-pathogenic. 
Recently Klein isolated the spores of enteritidis of normal virulence in one 
loopful of stool from one case of sudden fatal diarrhoea, and from a sample of 
diarrhoea associated with pneumonia; also in from one to three loopfuls of six 
samples of the ' more or less fluid contents of the colon transversum obtained, post- 
mortem, from six persons ' who died from various causes as epilepsy, peritonitis, 
cerebral abscess, etc. Lastly, in good-sized lumps of faecal matter obtained, post- 
mortem, from three out of five individuals in whom ' neither the history or the 
actual state of the bowel and contents of the colon suggested diarrhoea.'* 
Dr. Klein also tested the evacuations of forty-three persons suffering from 
typhoid at different periods of the disease and in convalescence, estimating the 
minimum number of spores present in the diarrhoeal and non-diarrhoeal stages. He- 
found that 'whereas in the phases of enteric fever associated with typical fluid typhoid 
stools, these spores of bacillus enteritidis are as a rule numerously present, in a 
* Medical Officer's Report, Local Government Board, 1898-99, p. 329. 
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