704 
CLAUDE D. MORRIS. 
gard this disease, is it not well to give the doubt the preference ? 
We would not be understood as sentimental, but we believe there 
are occasions when intuitive knowledge or science, or more 
plainly put, instinct, is to be relied upon, when doubt and ig¬ 
norance abound. What man possessing a cultured sensibility, 
to say nothing of professional knowledge in the medical science, 
can make himself believe that the flesh of a diseased carcass, 
though it be only localized, receiving its supply of blood from 
the systemic circulation; giving off its effete materials in the 
form of a ptomaine, to be partially eliminated through the pro¬ 
cess of arterialization in the lungs ; and then again the remain¬ 
ing fragments re-sent to all parts of the body; availing itself of 
every opportunity for lodgment in the tissues, though attenuated 
in vital form, must in time make general the same disease, that 
to outward appearance seems only local. The question of econ¬ 
omy should be subordinate to that of health ; therefore, we 
cannot admit that even thorough cooking is a sufficient guar¬ 
antee to properly sterilize the meat. It has been shown by 
recent investigation, that in many diseases it is not the charac¬ 
teristic bacilli of the disease which produces the toxic infection, 
manifesting the symptoms of the disease, but that it is a sub¬ 
product ; the result of the dead bodies of bacteria, a ptomaine, a 
soluble alkaloid, readily absorbed, capable of producing septic 
intoxication. “ Nearly all authorities are agreed that the bacilli 
present in the blood of tetanic patients are few, and in animals 
in which the disease was produced artificially the blood was 
often found sterile, the microbes being found at the seat of 
primary infection, and in the tissues between it and the spinal 
cord, than in the blood itself.” We must then conclude that 
the laboratory, from whence the ptomaines come, are the tissues 
in which localization takes place ; and it differs not, whether the 
disease is local or general, if of importance and contagious in its 
nature, the blood and the tissues possess “ the septic intoxica¬ 
tion which is carried by the presence of dead tissue in the body 
in a state of putrefaction, from the presence of putrefactive 
bacilli, and that the immediate cause of the intoxication is the 
