Abstract
A VERY distinguished audience assembled at the Parkes Museum on Thursday evening, March 27, to witness Mr. Watson Cheyne's demonstration of pathogenic micro-organisms. The chair was taken by Sir Joseph Lister, Bart. After stating that the great group commonly called Bacteria might most conveniently be subdivided into four classes—(1) Micrococci (round bodies), (2) Bacteria (small oval or rod-shaped bodies), (3) Bacilli (large rod-shaped bodies), and (4) Spirochsætæ and Spirilla (rods spirally twisted), and dwelling on the great variety as well as importance of the various parts played by this great group in the economy of nature, Mr. Watson Cheyne demonstrated numerous micro photographs taken by Dr. Robert Koch, as well as some drawings by means of a limelight apparatus. He observed that great differences existed among the various bacteria in their behaviour towards the human body: some could be injected without causing any injury, others could not grow in the living body, but could develop in dead portions of tissue and the secretions of wounds, giving rise to poisonous products. The true pathogenic organisms were able to attack the living body and multiply in it; they included the organisms which found entrance through some wound, giving rise to the traumatic infective diseases, and others which could obtain entrance without observable wound. Further, certain organisms, such as the B. anthracis, were capable of growing outside the body in dead organic substance, while others, such as the B. tuberculosis, were apparently only capable of development in the living organism or under artificial conditions which reproduced to some degree those existing in the tissues of warm-blooded animals, though capable of long retaining their vitality in the dry state. With regard to the traumatic infective diseases, he thought that the most absolute proof had been furnished that the bacteria found in them, and nothing else, were the causes of these diseases. To establish such a proposition it was necessary that an organism of a definite form and with definite characteristics should always be found in the blood or in the affected ]. art. The blood or the affected part when inoculated into another animal of the same species must produce the same disease. When the blood or the affected part was inoculated on a suitable soil outside the body, the microorganisms grew, and must be indefinitely propagated on similar soil. When in this manner the organisms had been separated from the remains of the materials in which they were embedded, their inoculation in an animal must produce again the same disease, the same organisms being found in the diseased parts. These conditions had now been fulfilled with regard to anthrax, septicæmia of the mouse, erysipelas, tuberculosis, glanders, and acute pneumonia. With regard to typhoid fever, relapsing fever, cholera, and ague, the evidence was very strong, but not conclusive. Mr. Watson Cheyne concluded by dwelling on the importance of surrounding circumstances, chiefly those summed up in the phrase unhygienic conditions, as concomitant causes of disease by preparing the blood for the attacks of these microorganisms.
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Bacteria . Nature 29, 559 (1884). https://doi.org/10.1038/029559a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/029559a0