510 
M. H. TOUSSAINT 
contagious nature of that disease and its dangers in the point of 
view of hygiene. 
When I begin the study of a contagious disease my first 
thought is to find the animal upon which the disease develops 
itself with most certainty and in the shortest time; such of my 
experiments were carried on with rabbits, pigs and cats. For 
the same reason anthrax was studied by others upon rabbits, be¬ 
cause the disease is rarely spontaneous in that animal. 
It is the same in pigs ; I have seen that tuberculosis kills as 
surely these two species of animals as anthrax destroys the 
rabbit. 
I believe, so far, that the susceptibility of the human species is 
still greater, and it seems to me very probable that if children, or 
even adults, were inoculated with tubercles, very few would 
escape contagion. A disease which kills the fifth of a species 
of animals is certainly a disease of that species. Tuberculosis is 
surely a disease of man, and when it exists under the form of 
germs in a great quantity of the aliments that we eat daily, is it 
too pretentious to say that sufficient conditions of hygiene to pre¬ 
vent this enormous mortality ought to be taken ? 
Tuberculosis of man is, then, the same as that of cattle ; when 
inoculated to animals it produces lesions absolutely alike, sus¬ 
ceptible of being transmitted to other animals, and to reproduce 
itself constantly with the same characters and forms. I con¬ 
vinced myself of this fact in feeding animals with human tuber¬ 
cles or by inoculating through the blood. As tuberculosis of 
cows, that of man is inoculable through the digestive canal, the 
blood, the liquid of secretion, and it always assumes identical 
characters. 
It is true that it will be said that tubercolosis is communi¬ 
cated equally by inoculation of inert substances, but here ex¬ 
planation is necessary. It has been proved by numerous patholo¬ 
gists that one may produce almost at will lesions similar to those 
of tuberculosis ; I have seen many similar complete cases ; but 
this disease, so easily given, cannot be reproduced by the inocu¬ 
lation of the tuberculosis so obtained. 
These experiments prove one thing, that the histological 
