14 
president’s address. 
also abounds in bacilli, but only those parts of the body where the 
disease is in active progress, hence it is not necessary to condemn 
the entire carcase of a tuberculous ox. In almost every country in 
Europe strenuous efforts are being made to find some antidote or 
germicide capable of destroying the tubercle bacillus within the 
body of its victim without destroying the victim himself at the 
same time. Hitherto these efforts have not been crowned with 
that success which seem their just due. From a theoretical point 
of view, it does not seem a very difficult task to annihilate the 
bacillus within the body itself. Outside the body it can be readily 
destroyed by a slight admixture of carbolic acid with the nutrient 
medium in which it is being cultivated. A proportionate quantity 
of carbolic acid introduced into the human system would not 
injuriously affect it, and ought to be equally destructive to the 
bacillus as it proves outside the body. But in practice it is quite 
different. Unfortunately, the carbolic acid is removed so fast from 
the system, by means of the excreting organs, that the bacilli never 
get their due share of the germicide. Attempts to destroy the 
bacilli in the lung itself, by means of local injections into those 
organs, have been very successfully carried out by one eminent 
Russian physician, but the general experience of the profession is 
adverse to the practice. The one great moral to be learned from our 
acquaintance with the bacillus of tubercle is this, that the disease 
is an infectious one. Being forewarned, we shall be forearmed, 
and not come into too close relations with the dried sputa of 
phthisical patients, and unboiled cows’ milk that may be swarming 
with tubercle bacilli. 
The Bacillus leprce , or the bacillus of Leprosy, bears a very 
close resemblance to that of Tubercle, but happily does not find 
itself at home in Old England. One of the most hotly disputed 
points in medicine has been whether leprosy is a contagious or 
hereditary disease. The discovery of the leprosy bacillus seems to 
have settled the point in favour of the contagious character of the 
malady. 
The bacillus of Typhoid Fever is one of the more recent 
bacteriological discoveries. Eberth, and after him Koch, found 
