Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 27.djvu/23

Rh By these experiments and operations a wide door is open to surgery in the treatment of diseases within the skull—diseases heretofore so obscure and uncertain that we have hardly dared to attack them. The question is not whether death or recovery followed in these particular cases. The great, the startling, the encouraging fact is that, thanks to these experiments, we can now, with well-nigh absolute certainty, diagnosticate, and with the greatest accuracy locate such diseases, and therefore reach them by operation, and treat them successfully. Would that I had been born twenty-five years later, that I might enjoy with you the full luxury of such magnificent life-saving, health-giving discoveries!

It is, however, by the experimental study of the effects of minute organisms—microbes, as they are now called—that some of the latest and most remarkable results have been achieved. The labors of Koch, Pasteur, Klein, Cheyne, Tommasi-Crudeli, Wood, Formad, Sternberg, and others, are now known even to the daily press. Let us see what they have done.

It is but three years since Koch announced that consumption was caused by the "bacillus tuberculosis." Later he has studied cholera and found the "comma-bacillus," to which he ascribes that dreaded disease. In spite of the opposition of prominent scientists, his views have been in general accepted, and seem to be reasonable.

The method of experiment is simple, though difficult. The suspected expectoration or discharge is placed in a suitable soil, and after cultivation some of this growth is placed in another culture-soil, and so on till generation after generation is produced, the violence of the poison being modified by each culture. A small portion of any one of these cultures is then injected under the skin of a mouse or other animal, and in time it dies or is killed, and the results are verified by the post-mortem.

So exact is the knowledge in tuberculosis now that Koch can predict almost to an hour when the mouse will die of consumption, or that it will escape, according to the culture used.

It is far too early as yet to say that these studies have borne the immense practical fruit that the next few years will show; but they have already enabled us to recognize by the microscope doubtful cases of consumption in their earlier and more remediable stages, and have made certain what has hitherto been only a probability—that consumption is distinctly contagious.

By Gerlach's experiments on animals with the milk from tubercular cows, also, it has been shown that consumption may be contracted from such milk. How important this conclusion is, in so universal an article of food to young and old, I need not do aught than state.

The experiments of Wood and Formad on diphtheria I have already alluded to. Those of Tommasi-Crudeli also have shown that probably