Abstract
THIS important essay by one whom Garrison, describes as the greatest German histologist and one of the greatest anatomists of all time, was originally published in 1840 in Henle's “Pathologische Untersuchungen”, and contains the first clear statement that living organisms are the cause of contagious and infectious diseases. Dr. George Rosen, who has provided an excellent translation, points out that Henlo's theory was not based on any personal experiments but on the data collected by his predecessors, such as Athanasius Kircher and Leeuwenhoek in the seventeenth century, who described infusoria and other microscopic animalcules, Wichmann who discovered the Acarus scabiei, Agostino Bassi who found that muscardine, an infectious disease of silkworms, was caused by a fungus, Cagniard de la Tour and Schwann, who showed that fermentation was due to yeast, and Schönlein, who discovered the parasitic cause of favus. Henle maintained that in infectious disease the morbid matter increased from the time that it entered the body, and that it must be organic in nature as only living organisms were able to do this. His view that the organism probably belonged to the plant kingdom was confirmed by Robert Koch, one of the most eminent of his pupils, more than thirty years later.
On Miasmata and Contagia
Jacob
Henle
By. Translated by Dr. George Rosen. Pp. 77. (Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins Press, 1938.) 1 dollar.
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Biology. Nature 144, 896 (1939). https://doi.org/10.1038/144896b0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/144896b0