Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 39.djvu/45

Rh isolate the virus of rabies. Although he did not succeed in doing so, he discovered that the nervous tissues acquired in that disease virulent properties which indicated the presence in them of some unknown virus. Not being able to obtain the virus itself, Pasteur used the nervous tissue as he would have a nutrient medium, and having discovered the method of obtaining spinal cords having a constant virulence (fixed virus), he dealt with these cords in the same way as he would have with ordinary cultivations, and thus succeeded (1885) in attenuating the virus and being able to produce immunity by vaccination, as in the case of the other diseases. Many other methods have been proposed for attenuating the virulence of organisms than those introduced by Pasteur. We have already seen how Toussaint and Chauveau used rapid heating. Paul Bert showed that oxygen under high pressure (twenty atmospheres) kills the Bacillus anthracis. Toussaint, Chamberland, and Roux (1880-'86) added dilute carbolic, chromic, and sulphuric acids to nutrient media for the same purpose. Klein (1888) used also very small quantities of corrosive sublimate for the same purpose. Arloing (1886) showed that bright sunlight has also an attenuating effect on cultivations in fluid media. It is useless to go into the further developments of these methods, that of Pasteur being the only one which has had very extensive application as yet so far as man is concerned.

Refractory State produced by the Introduction into the System of Definite Chemical Products resulting from the Action of Pathogenic Organisms on Cultivation Media.—Salmon and Smith (1883) seem to have been the first to realize the practical importance of the injection of the products of growth of organisms independently of the organisms themselves. They showed that the injection of cultivations of the microbe causing hog cholera produces the effects of attenuated virus after being sterilized by heat, at any rate in the case of pigeons. (It was, however, accepted before that time that micro-organisms generate products which are deadly to themselves and are capable of arresting their growth, a fact which has also long been known in connection with fermentation organisms.) Pasteur very early showed also that filtered chicken-cholera bouillon injected into a bird produced the symptoms of the disease, although no organism was present in the fluid. He showed also that the same is true of the blood of animals affected with anthrax.

In attempting to explain the effects of inoculation with spinal cord for rabies, Pasteur also alluded, in 1885, to the probable existence of some chemical compound in the cords which he used for protective inoculation, and suspected that this compound was instrumental in bringing about immunity. It was only about 1887 that these facts and views acquired fresh significance by