president’s address. 
15 
this bacillus in the bodies of almost all persons dying of this fever 
But contrary to what might have been anticipated from clinical 
experience, the bacillus has not been discovered in the intestinal 
canal, though present in most of the abdominal organs. The 
medical profession has always looked upon the excreta of typhoid 
patients as the chief source of danger ; but this can hardly be the 
case if the typhoid bacillus is invariably absent from them. Strange 
to say, all attempts to induce typhoid fever in the lower animals, 
by inoculating them with these germs, have proved ineffectual. 
It is not a little strange, too, that the typhoid bacillus, although it 
can be artificially cultivated in nutrient media, does not occur 
spontaneously outside the body of its victims, either in drinking- 
water or elsewhere. The fact that the germs perish quickly in 
clean water, puts an end to the foolish notions everywhere prevalent 
that impure drinking-water is the chief cause of all our infectious 
maladies. Having been called upon so often to analyse drinking- 
water that could not possibly, in the very nature of things, contain 
any disease germs, I speak rather feelingly on the subject. Let us 
by all means have the purest drinking-water we can get, but not 
jump to the irrational conclusion that infinitesimal amounts of 
dead animal or vegetable matter in the water we drink can produce, 
at their own sweet will, any one of half-a-dozen or more specific 
infectious maladies. 
The bacillus of Tetanus discovered by Kicolaier is ignored by 
most English writers on Bacteria. On the Continent it is pretty 
generally recognized as the contagium vivum of Tetanus or 
Lock-jaw. It has been found outside the body in garden soil and 
gravel, a fact which explains why persons are attacked with 
tetanus without having come in contact with patients suffering 
from the same malady. The risk of tetanus is, therefore, omni- 
present ; and it is impossible to foresee whether a slight wound 
will heal up in the ordinary way, or be the precursor of this almost 
invariably fatal malady. When the lower animals are inoculated 
with Nicolaier’s bacillus, tetanus always ensues. 
The bacillus of Glanders, discovered by Schiitz and Loeffler in 
1882 , is generally recognized, at present, as the cause of that 
