REMARKS ON MICRO-ORGANISMS. 
851 
was thus obtained in an isolated form, and, when now inocu¬ 
lated into the house-mouse produced in that animal gangrene 
pure and simple, extending for an indefinite period among its 
tissues. 
Thus the animal body, which had previously been an 
obscure field of labour in this department, in which the 
pathologists did little more than grope in the dark, was con¬ 
verted by Koch into a pure cultivating apparatus, in which 
the growth and effects of the micro-organisms of various in¬ 
fective diseases could be studied with the utmost simplicity 
and precision. 
One more example I must take from Koch’s work. On 
one occasion, as the result of inoculating putrid liquid into a 
rabbit, he observed a spreading inflammation having all the 
clinical character of erysipelas; and, on examining stained 
sections of the part, he discovered another exquisitely delicate 
bacillus resembling the micrococcus of the gangrene, in being 
local in its development, while its exact correspondence in 
extent with that of the disease led fairly to the conclusion 
that it constituted the materies morbid 
I will next refer to a disease occasioned by a micro-organism 
discovered by the eminent pathologist Professor Toussaint, of 
Toulouse, whom I am proud to see present in this Section to¬ 
day. This disease has been somewhat inappropriately termed 
Cholera desponies, or fowl-cholera, for it is not attended with 
diarrhoea or any other of the symptoms of cholera; but, as it 
happened to be extremely destructive among the poultry- 
ynards of Paris at the same time that an epidemic of cholera 
was raging in the city, the disorder that prevailed among the 
fowls was also given the name of cholera. The lesions by 
which it is chiefly characterised are great swelling of the 
chains of lymphatic glands in the vicinity of the trachea, 
pericarditis accompanied with great effusion, and congestion, 
and it may be ulceration, of the mucous membrane of the 
duodenum. It is a blood-disease, and highly infectious. If 
some of the blood of a chicken that has died of it be mixed 
with the oats with which healthy chickens are fed, a con¬ 
siderable proportion, perhaps four out of six, are affected and 
die; and similar results are produced by mixing the intestinal 
excreta of diseased fowls with the food. It is an interesting 
question how the virus thus administered enters the circulation. 
The invariable affection of the lymphatic glands of the throat 
suo-o-ests to M. Toussaint the idea that some accidental 
O c? 
* See c Untersuchungen iiber die Actiologie der Wundinfectionskrank- 
eliiten.’ Yon Dr. Robert Koch. Leipzig, 1878. A translation is about to 
be issued by the Sydenham Society. 
