Lancashire veterinary medical association. 
521 
were cooked with the hot oil, or paraffin temperature had been sufficient 
to coagulate albumen, but an internal kernel was red, proving that the 
temperature here had not been sufficient to coagulate albumen ; and 
upon examination was found to swarm with fine active Bacteria, and the 
conclusion he is forced to is that either Bacteria or germs were present 
in the organ, and that whilst it was healthy. The blood of animals, 
when due care is taken in extracting it so as not to permit of its being 
infected from without, does not normally contain either Bacteria or their 
germs. That they can readily enter the animal system by mucous 
membrane of bowels, lacteals, and pulmonary mucous membrane there 
is no doubt; after elaborately arguing the matter he comes to the con¬ 
clusion either that the Bacteria are formed and are immediately afterwards 
destroyed, or that they are not allowed to germinate. Whilst we have 
abundant proof, on the one hand, that the normal blood does not contain 
Bacteria, we have also proof, on the other hand, that in peritoneal and 
pleural effusions in rodents, however produced, it invariably happens 
that the exudation liquids contain swarms of Bacteria. By the term 
septicaemia is meant the aggregate of the effects which are produced in 
the animal organism when putrid matter is mixed with the blood stream. 
Artificially this can be readily produced in the dog, and is analogous in 
the course it runs and the symptoms to which it gives rise to the fatal 
septicaemia of our hospitals, commonly called hospital fever. There are 
many reasons why our patients do not suffer so frequently from this 
disorder as man. But that it has been the cause of death (although 
overlooked at the time) to numbers of our patients I shall be able to 
prove clearly, I believe, before the close. Dr. Burdon Sanderson in one 
of his lectures “ On the Infective Processes of Disease,” speaking of 
septicmmia, says:—“ Inasmuch as we cannot be certain in any case of 
clinical septicaemia that the symptoms or post-mortem results are exclu¬ 
sively due to septic contamination, it is clearly necessary to take the 
experimental facts rather than the clinical as our starting point. After 
detailing many of the experiments on this subject by continental autho¬ 
rities, he takes the symptoms as exhibited by a dog after septic matter 
has been injected, and compares them with the symptoms as found in 
this disease in man. Shows the analogy of these and post-mortem appear¬ 
ances as well. He then goes on and proves clearly that although septic 
matter does not necessarily contain Bacteria, yet it cannot be produced 
without their agency. His reasons for coming to this conclusion are best 
given in his own words.” So far as our present knowledge reaches none 
of the known chemical products of the putrefactive disintegration of 
albuminous compounds can be indicated as the cause of the toxic action of 
putrid infusions; for in respect to each of them we have experimental 
evidence that, when separately introduced into the organism in such 
quantity as would correspond to a poisonous condition of the septic liquid, 
of which it is a constituent, it produces no toxic effect whatever. The 
inference is, therefore, suggested that the poison is not any product of 
the septic disintegration of proteid bodies, but a something which is 
much more intimately associated than any of them are with the existence 
and growth of the ferment-organisms themselves. This inference has 
been fully justified by experiment. It has been shown by Professor 
Bergmann that the septic poison can be produced by the action of 
Bacteria on material which contains no albuminous compound. He 
found—and we are now familiar with the fact by repeated experiments— 
that if you grow Bacteria in the cultivating liquid to which I previously 
referred, of which the composition is given in the table, the first crop of 
Bacteria are inert; but eventually you obtain a product which possesses 
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