A brief review of our knowledge of the relation of micro-organisms to diseases in man / by William Robert Smith.

  • Smith, William Robert, 1850-1932.
Date:
1889
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: A brief review of our knowledge of the relation of micro-organisms to diseases in man / by William Robert Smith. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by The Royal College of Surgeons of England. The original may be consulted at The Royal College of Surgeons of England.

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    staphylococcus aureus. From these experiments the deduc- tion is made that carbuncle and whitlow are infective diseases, caused by the same coccus as is found in osteo- myelitis, viz., the staphylococcus pyogenes aureus. Gonorrhoea.—The organism which is connected with this disease, the micrococcus gonorrhoe£e (gonococcus), was dis- covered by Neisser in 1879 ; it is constantly present in the pus, and very frequently in the epithelial cells; the cocci generally occur in pairs or groups, and their opposing sur- faces are flattened; they are found at the very commence- ment of the disease, and diminish in number as the disease becomes chronic. This organism is difficult of cultivation, not growing on gelatine, but slowly growing on blood-serum, forming a thin, greyish-yellow coating. Bunner inoculated a cultivation into the urethra of a healthy woman, with the result of producing acute urethritis. Puerperal Fever.—An inquiry into the etiology of this disease I undertook at the request of the committee of the Brown Institute, and in a paper read last November at the Royal Medico-Chirurgical Society, I have recorded the result of my observations. I obtained from the heart’s blood of a patient, who had died a few hours previously from well- marked puerperal fever, a micrococcus, which was present in large numbers ; from another patient, who was an inmate of St. Bartholomew’s Hospital, I obtained the same organism from the blood taken from the finger. This organism, in its microscopical and cultural peculi- arities, closely resembled those already described as belonging to the organism described by Fehleisen as the cause of erysipelas and the streptococcus pyogenes; its effect, how- ever, upon animals is most distinctive; mice inoculated with it invariably die in the course of two or three days, and the organism can be recovered from their heart’s blood ; and the ears of rabbits inoculated with it show a well-marked diffused redness, which shows no disposition to spread,and very shortly disappears. Glanders.—This disease in man is very rare, and it is only within the last sixty or seventy years that its occurrence has been clearly recognised; there is no evidence to suggest that the disease ever originates in man, but is generally communicated by direct inoculation of virus from a diseased animal. Researches into the etiology of this disease were under- taken by Dr. Loffler and Prof. Schutz. They first sought for definite forms of bacteria among the specific products of glanders contained in the glanders nodules; sections were