Abstract
THE reporter of the French Commission appointed to investigate the mode of action of the cholera poison and its method of propagation, as judged of from the behaviour of the disease during the epidemic in the southern provinces of France, has made public the con clusions which have been arrived at. It will be remem bered that the French Commission which studied the same subject in Egypt last summer differed from the German one in regarding the blood as containing the specific organism of the disease, a contention which found no support in this country when the medical societies had had an opportunity of examining microscopically the preparations which were supposed to afford proof of it. Dr. Koch, chief of the German Commission, on the con trary, declared that the French statement was due to an error of observation, and maintained that the comma bacillus which he had discovered in the coats and con tents of the intestines formed the specific germ of the disease. The French Commission of 1884 now return to the subject by still maintaining that the blood contains the poison, and that the initial lesion of cholera takes place in the blood. In proof of this they describe the changes which the blood cells undergo during the process of cholera; they regard certain modifications, such as result from the entire loss of elasticity of the globules, as one of the most certain signs of the patient's impending death; they maintain that by the hourly examination of the blood of cholera patients the progress of the malady can be mathematically followed; they assert that cholera, as such, is transmissible to the rabbit as the result of the injection into its veins of the blood of a cholera patient at the algid period; and lastly, they maintain that the microbe specially described by Dr. Koch has no such specific properties as have been claimed for it.
Article PDF
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
The Cholera Poison . Nature 30, 557 (1884). https://doi.org/10.1038/030557a0
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/030557a0