General pathology, as conducive to the establishment of rational principles for the diagnosis and treatment of disease : a course of lectures, delivered at St. Thomas's Hospital, during the summer session of 1850 / by John Simon.

  • Simon, John, Sir, 1816-1904.
Date:
1850
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: General pathology, as conducive to the establishment of rational principles for the diagnosis and treatment of disease : a course of lectures, delivered at St. Thomas's Hospital, during the summer session of 1850 / by John Simon. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by the Francis A. Countway Library of Medicine, through the Medical Heritage Library. The original may be consulted at the Francis A. Countway Library of Medicine, Harvard Medical School.

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    of Corn) in the latter end of the summer, must the air be loaded, as it were, with this animated dust ready whenever a gentle breeze,aecorapanied with humidity, shall give the signal, to intrude itself into the pores of thousands of acres of corn. Now here is exactly the case for the vegetables that Henle and Dr. Holland imagine for animals; and what is the re- sult ? why, wherever on the plant they may alight, a local result; a result so like the porrigo of animals, that a distin- guished botanist calls these diseases the exanthemata of plants. In each pore, where a sporule alights, it grows, and branches, and breeds—spoils the part; and, if there be enough of them for the purpose, then (like hydatids in the sheep) they drain and starve the whole organism of the plant. I can give you a good illustration of this simple method of operation, in quoting one paragraph from Sir Joseph Banks's paper, which I have already alluded to. He remarks, that although the seeds of wheat are rendered, by the exhausting power of the fungus, so lean and shrivelled, that scarce any flour fit for the manu- facture of bread can be obtained by grinding them, these very seeds will (except, perhaps, in the very worst cases) answer the purposes of seed-corn as well as the fairest and plumpest sample that can be obtained. This is very unlike syphilis or small-pox: they produce on the organism an influ- ence utterly unlike these phenomena of starvation; nor is the mother's disorder, by these poisons, such as to leave her ofl^spring uncontaminated. As a somewhat analogous case occurring in the animal kingdom—analogous, I mean, as to the abundance of parasitic life undergoing development and effecting change in the body, I may remind you of that im- mense diffusion of parasitic eggs which I told you I had seen in rabbits, not only loading their livers, but filling even the follicles of the intestine like epithelium; and yet with no general affection of health. But there is one case, still more nearly analogous to vegetable blight, which Henle puts foremost in his argument, and to which he attaches great importance. In the silk-making parts of France and Italy—a disease has been noticed to rise like a pestilence among the worms, to kill them by myriads.