ETIOLOGY OF TUBERCULOSIS. 
Ill 
lung also, in eight cases pieces of the intestinum tenuewitli tuberculous ulcer¬ 
ations, and just as often caseous mesentric glands. Several times the abscesses 
of the intestinum tenue were surrounded by fresh tuberculous erruptions, which 
followed the lymph-passages. 
The growth of the bacilli appears, at least so far as we can come to a con¬ 
clusion from the material at my disposal, to find more favorable conditions in 
the intestines than is usually the case in the lungs. It should not therefore 
surprise us if, in the excrement of a person suffering from phthisic and tuber¬ 
culous abscesses, tuberculous bacilli occur in comparatively large numbers, as 
Lichtheim first discovered. Among the numberless and very largely staff- 
formed bacteria of the intestinal contents the microscopic proof of tuberculous 
bacilli would have proved itself as good as impossible, if it had not been for 
the specific tinctorial properties of the latter, which just in this case proved 
themselves especially useful. Since from several sides the certainty of the 
proof of tuberculous bacilli in intestinal excrement has been doubted, I urged 
Dr. Gaffky to undertake a number of investigations. These showed that neither 
in the excrement of healthy persons nor in those of sick ones, who were not 
suffering from tuberculous diseases, any sort of bacteria were found which 
gave the same sort of color-reaction as the tuberculous bacilli. Also in the case 
of all persons afflicted with phthisis, who were examined in regard to it and 
who had tuberculous bacilli in the sputum, it was impossible to prove such in 
the excrement, but they could regularly be shown in such patients when they 
had plain symptoms of ulcerous disease of the intestines. One observation 
made by Gaffky during these investigations deserves special mention. Namely, 
in the contents of the intestines there not seldom occur large spore-bearing 
bacilli, whose bodies, like those of all other bacteria, take the brown color, while 
the spores remain colored more or less intensely blue. The spores appear to 
be more darkly blue the younger they are. When the body of the bacillus 
perishes and the spore alone remains, since in size it resembles a large micro¬ 
coccus, it can easily be mistaken for one at first sight; especially when several 
spores lie near together they can be very similar to a little heap of large micro¬ 
cocci. Probably, therefore, the formations described by Lichtheim as blue- 
colored micrococci are identical with these spores. But it appears that other 
bacilli occurring in the intestines form spores, which by Ehrlich’s color-treat¬ 
ment keep the blue color, for Gaffky found in the excrement of a tuberculous 
monkey, beside tuberculous bacilli, bacilli of still larger dimensions than those 
just mentioned. These had not egg-shaped, but very long-extended, almost 
staff-shaped, spores. The spores were fixed in the ends, and in bacilli of more 
than one member so arranged that in two neighboring members the spore¬ 
bearing ends were turned towards each other and followed in the manner indi¬ 
cated here: —1 -— —- -—* The points are spores, the lines bacilli-members, 
a peculiar arrangement of the spores to which I on another occasion have 
already drawn attention.* The spores of the anthrax-bacilli, hay and potato 
bacilli were also tried by Ehrlich’s color-method and did not show the reaction, 
but it is nevertheless veiy probable that still other sorts of bacilli-spores act 
*F. Cohn’s Beitrage zur Biology dor Pflanzen. Vol. 2 , Book 3. 
