Essays on the floating-matter of the air in relation to putrefaction and infection.

  • Tyndall, John, 1820-1893.
Date:
1883
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Essays on the floating-matter of the air in relation to putrefaction and infection. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by the Gerstein Science Information Centre at the University of Toronto, through the Medical Heritage Library. The original may be consulted at the Gerstein Science Information Centre, University of Toronto.

    30/366 (page 8)
    ^ influenced probably by the great authority of Gay- of decay. It was not, they said, the living yeast-plant, but the dead or dying part of it, which, assailed by oxygen, produced the fermentation. But, as a matter of fact, when the plant is killed the ferment disappears. Mediate or immediate, the real ' ferments' are living organisms which find in fermentable substances their necessary food. Side by side with these researches and discoveries, and fortified by them and others, has run the germ theory of epidemic disease. The notion was expressed^ by Kircher, and favoured by Linnseus, that epidemic diseases may be due to germE.which float in^^^^^^^^^ mosphere, enter the body, and produce disturbance by the development within the body of parasitic life. The strength of this theory consists in the perfect parallelism of the phenomena of contagious disease with those of life.. As a planted acorn gives birth to an oak, competent to produce a whole crop of acorns, each gifted with the power of reproducing its parent tree ; and as thus from a single seedling a whole forest may spring; so, it is contended, these epidemic diseases literally plant their seeds, grow, and shake abroad new germs, which, meeting in the human body their proper food and temperature, finally take possession of whole populations. There is nothing to my knowledge in pure chemistry_which reseinbTp.s the power of propaga- tiuir'and sel^multiip^^'^^^^^^^-P'^^^^^ hyJ-.ViA TYiaff^r which produces epidemic disease. If yQU__sQw wheat VQU do not get b^rjpy ; ^'^ y^^^ °^^ gTmnH-pn^ ymi Hn not get scarlet-fever^ but small-pox indefinitely^mul- ti5lied,~anc[''lLbEEing.-else,- The, matter of each con- tagious disease reproduces itself as-jigidly as if it were fas Miss Nightingale puts it) dog or cat.