Veterinary medicines : their actions and uses / by Finlay Dun.

Date:
1882
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Veterinary medicines : their actions and uses / by Finlay Dun. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh. The original may be consulted at the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh.

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    g. Germ spawn of various descriptions, granular, found in animal fluids in which mature germs are present, as in tuber- culous and cancerous discharges. Of these organised disease germs the most dangerous to animal life are those developed amidst morbid animal tex- tures. Each has its own mode of life, its own congenial soil. Several occasionally are found together in the same animal. In the various groups are evidently several distinctive varieties. Amongst the Bacilli, for example, some produce local gangrene, others°erysipelas, others widely-spread septicaemia, others the infectious poultry anthrax, others splenic apoplexy. Althougli many of these rapidly-multiplying germs die with the death of the tissue on which they are nourished, their spores survive, sometimes for years, and may be distributed by water, carried by flies or worms, or wafted through the air. Kecent researches of M. Pasteur, Professor Greenfield, and others, demonstrate that these organised animal ferments or disease-producing germs can be disarmed of evil by rendering the bodies on which they usually attach themselves unsuitable for their reception. Yeast does not multiply in solutions from which sugar and sugar-producing bodies are removed. Virus attenuated by cultivation is found to become an antidote to its deadly parent virus. Pasteur has shown that the virus of charbon not only loses its lethal effects when passed by inocu- lation through five or six mice or guinea-pigs, but protects the inoculated subject from the fatal anthrax. Professor Greenfield has demonstrated that the deadly virus of splenic apoplexy with impunity may be introduced into the bodies of cattle which have previously been vaccinated with attenuated lymph. Eecent experiments encourage the hope that even rabies may be prevented by inoculating subjects bitten by a mad dog with attenuated rabies lymph. The beneficent cultivated virus used in such cases appears to exhaust or break up the congenial material present in the susceptible subject, and on which the corresponding deadly virus, had it the opportunity, would fix itself. Some medicinal antiseptics possibly possess similar powers in altering the animal fluids so that they are rendered unsuitable for the growth of particular animal poisons. Professor Polli of Milan found that dogs.