Volume I 
JUNE, 1908 
No. 2 
NOTE ON A LIVER ABSCESS OF AMOEBIC 
ORIGIN IN A MONKEY. 
Plate VIII. 
By ALDO CASTELLANI, M.D., 
Director of the Clinic for Tropical Diseases , Colombo {Ceylon). 
Since November 1906 I have had in the animal house attached to 
the Bacteriological Laboratory, a rather large female Mctcacus pileatus 
(No. 47). This monkey, which had been bought from a villager, had 
never been used for any experiment: it was kept in the same cage with 
a moukey inoculated with yaws. In October 1907 the monkey, which 
so far had been in good health, began to lose appetite, and looked 
somewhat ill; nevertheless the animal continued to jump about in the 
cage and play with its companion till a short time before death, on 
5. xi. 07. The monkey never had any diarrhoea, and I thought it 
might have died from a peculiar form of malaria, extremely common 
in Ceylon monkeys. 
Autopsy : made immediately after death : lungs and heart normal; 
heart blood and venous blood did not show the presence of Plasmodia 
or any other blood parasites; spleen not enlarged, contained no pigment 
and no haematozoa; intestine to all appearances normal; the mucosa 
did not show any ulceration nor scars due to earlier ulcerations; 
contents of colon and rectum semisolid, no blood or mucus; liver 
somewhat enlarged, a yellowish tumour on the upper surface—which 
I at first took for a cyst. On cutting, it became clear that it was an 
abscess the size of a very small nut; the pus was yellowish with a little 
blood and resembled the pus found in human liver abscesses. 
On microscopical examination the pus was found to contain 
leucocytes, a few red corpuscles, and much detritus. What struck me 
was the presence of a few slowly moving amoebae. The amoebae were 
more numerous in scrapings from the walls of the abscess. The 
amoebae were not present in the intestinal contents which appeared to 
Parasitology i 7 
