BACTERIOLOGY IN A NUTSHELL, 
Proclamation 
of 
Semmelweis. 
strong acid or alkaline solutions decomposition 
would not take place.” Other scientists began to 
work along the same lines and obtained similar 
results. Their experiments, for the most part, 
were made upon wounds and their infections. 
They made no attempt to reproduce the infectious 
diseases by inoculation, which is the method used 
in our day. Numbers of scientific men of that 
period believed the presence of micro-organisms 
in the blood and tissues of individuals to be a 
normal condition. Others urged that the micro¬ 
organisms found in diseased conditions were the 
result of the disease and not its cause. 
A number of years passed before the work of 
discovering a special germ for each infectious 
disease made much progress. 
In 1847 Ignatius P. Semmelweis, a young 
Hungarian pursuing his studies in Vienna, pro¬ 
claimed to the world one of the greatest discov¬ 
eries along bacteriological lines, namely, that 
puerperal sepsis is the result of the invasion of 
the puerperal genital tract by specific micro-or¬ 
ganisms and from that year a new era in obstet¬ 
rical practice is dated. (There was much scep¬ 
ticism with regard to the theory of Semmelweis 
and he is said to have died in an insane asylum 
his malady the result of worry over unfriendlv 
criticism.) In 1849 the germ which causes 
anthrax was discovered by Pollender, of Ger¬ 
many, but it was not until the year 1863 that 
*Casimir Joseph Devaine, a Frenchman, by the 
process of inoculation proved that Pollender’s 
germ really produced anthrax. 
*Casimir Joseph Devaine, born at St. Armand-les- 
Eaux, France, in 1812; died in 1882. 
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