Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 27.djvu/859

Rh condition which most concerns us is that of a favorable nidus. A favorable nidus is one in which the germ is enabled to carry on its full vital functions, and to propagate its kind. It is therefore manifest that the constitution of the nidus must be free from elements antagonistic to such vital functions. It must not be too hot, or too cold, or too dry, and its chemical constitution must be favorable. Experiment has proved that oxygen in excess is deleterious to these organisms; its absence, entire or partial, will then be one of the requisites in this chemical constitution of the nidus. Is not such nidus best found in decaying or degenerating animal tissue? Where there is full vital activity in any animal tissue, the blood which nourishes it keeps it duly supplied with oxygen. In healthy tissue, then, we have a condition unfavorable; but when from some cause the nutrition of the tissue is interfered with and a condition of degeneration is induced, this antagonistic element is removed or at least diminished, and the tissue affords the nidus favorable to the vital phenomena of the germs. These vital phenomena are perhaps best studied in the analogous case of the spores of yeast (torula cerevisiæ). When this, which is to all intents and purposes a germ, is placed in favorable circumstances, its activity commences, it rapidly multiplies and gives rise to changes in the surrounding material. In this case we call the process "fermentation." A germ, bacillus, bacterion, or vibrio, when placed in relation to tissue which affords a favorable nidus, assumes its full vital activity; it multiplies and gives rise to changes in the tissue with which it is in contact. These changes we call "inflammation." In fact, it would appear that these germs in one sense fulfill the part of Nature's scavengers, and by setting up inflammatory changes in degenerate tissues lead to their removal. Be this as it may, the diseases to which the germs give rise are all more or less of an inflammatory nature.

Thus, then, it would seem that one of the chief vital functions of these germs is to excite an inflammatory process in degenerate tissue. Is it not conceivable that germs may have existed, or even do still exist now, whose function is strictly limited to action on degenerate tissue?—that this may perhaps have been the limit strictly assigned to them? Let us suppose this to be the case, and see how, from this limited condition, germs have acquired power to overstep these limits, and thus to give rise to the protean aspects of disease that we now meet with. What has caused variation in the animal world but the influences of surrounding circumstances? In the relationship of the germs and the degenerate tissue, it is plain that in one sense the germs are the active, and the tissue the passive, elements. But, looked at from the tissue point of view, it will also appear that this passive condition possesses considerable indirect influence on the germs; that, indeed, "passive" is hardly the word to express the action which must largely modify their constitution. It would be impossible for the germs to live, to grow, to multiply on a certain tissue without