The Practitioner Volume 26

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can usually download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1881 edition. Excerpt: ...and accumulate, ' but more often a bleak barren ridge where the surface air is most rapidly changed and most copiously diluted. And, independently of this objection, there is a great difficulty in understanding how a morbid process, supposed to be set up by an external nonspecific agent, could afterwards be communicated with perfect similarity by means of a specific agent of a different kind. If like effects betoken like causes, it must be granted that the matter which causes diphtheria in the later extension of an 2 Dr. Woodforde, however, has found diphtheriaapparently favoured by thick growth of trees about a village, and disappearing when the trees were thinned. (See Sanitary Record, February, 1880.) epidemic is of the same kind as that which causes it in the first case. But in the later cases the morbific matter is something that has multiplied greatly in its progress through a series 'of human bodies. Therefore, the original morbific matter should be something of a specific nature that is capajole of multiplication in the human body. Nothing will satisfy this condition except a specific living organism. At this point our inquiry comes into relation with the discoveries of Oertel and Hiiter (referred to in the first footnote. Setting aside the question whether this specific organism is or is not capable of spontaneous generation, it concerns us to ask whether it is capable of multiplication outside as well as inside the human body, ---" now fructifying in soil or water of appropriate quality, and now the self-multiplying contagium of a bodily disease." 1 If this morbific organism were incapable of thriving outside the human body, the untraceable October outbreaks of the disease could only be ascribed to the...