A short note on peritoneoclysis, hypodermoclysis, and vesicoclysis in cholera : a paper read before the Bombay Medical and Physical Society, February 6, 1885 / by Cameron Macdowall.

  • Macdowall, Cameron Joseph Francis Stuart, 1832-
Date:
[1886]
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Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: A short note on peritoneoclysis, hypodermoclysis, and vesicoclysis in cholera : a paper read before the Bombay Medical and Physical Society, February 6, 1885 / by Cameron Macdowall. 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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    medicine (and of statesmen also, as the acts of political parties abundantly show) is called the ' treatment of symptoms,' I am obliged to take some notice of bacteria while advocating such treatment of a disease alleged to be microbian. But although a treatment of symptoms may not always aim at the immediate direct removal of the cause, it does so indirectly by aiding nature, and is by no means incompatible with the idea of a perishable microbian origin of cholera. Microbicide drugs also can be combined with the water of the injection. But besides the fact of the disease not being apparently contagious from man to man, i.e., by handling the patient, touching his tongue, pulse, etc., as all doctors do, there are other reasons for not being quite sure yet that Professor Koch's bacillus is the cause of cholera. In Ferran's so-called attenuated cultivations used for inoculation, there were seen commas, both simple and studded all over with granulations or buds, spirilli, cocci, and every form more or less described by Babes, Cornel, Petronel, Van Ermengem, etc. ; and yet we are told that we know these cultivations, on which no efficient systematic Pasteurian attenuation had been apparently practised (save the addition of bile !). We are told, and we know, that these inoculations were generally negative : not always so, but sufficiently often to show that they were neither preventive nor infective. But now we are told that these buddings or ' granula- tions,' * muriform ' bodies, etc., which metamorphose the appearance of the comma bacillus and spirilli (from which latter, indeed, the commas arise)—we are told that these appearances are forms of involution or degeneration, and that they are sterile and not spores, nor ' pollcnodes ' nor ' gonidia,' etc. (see Doyen's admirable paper in the Progres Medical, 4th July, 1885); tliat only the commas are contagious, etc.