Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 5.djvu/572

554 rapidity in the depths of the tissues and humors, where they labor in a manner opposed to the harmonious life of the body.

However this may be, the vibrios and bacteria have an undeniable share in the production of human maladies. They are found in the blood of persons attacked by infectious disorders, and if in many cases their relation to these disorders is only that of concomitants, in others, their relation of causality is very clearly ascertained. Thus M. Davaine's investigations prove that the maladies called carbuncular, so formidable in men and animals, are due to the excessive development of a species of bacteria in the blood. Typhoid fever also seems to acknowledge a cause of the same kind. Rabbits die from inoculation with blood taken from men attacked by this disease. Our knowledge upon this difficult subject, it must be owned, is very little advanced, in spite of the ardent labors devoted to its extension in the past few years. The illusions of the microscope and the exaggerations of a spirit of routine too often impair the value of studies undertaken in this direction. Without going so far as does the opinion of those who attribute all these disorders to microscopic corpuscles, and regard all morbid phenomena as fermentations, it must at any rate be admitted that these corpuscles, diffused throughout the air, take an important place among the eternal enemies of health. At all times surgeons and physicians have recognized the danger from penetration of common air into the interior of the organism, by the way of wounds or otherwise. We now understand the explanation of the danger. It is not the gases of the air that are dangerous; but the proto-organisms contained in that fluid must be charged with the fatal influence it exerts in traumatic cases, and putrid infection has no other origin. Thus the anxiety of practitioners now is to protect wounds from access by the germs in the air, by means either of impermeable coating, or of antiseptic dressings, containing alcohol or phenic acid, or by pneumatic closing up, or by filtration of the air itself through cotton. Under the influence of ideas distinctly introduced into science by the researches we have just reviewed, several practices in surgery have undergone great modifications.

After examining the alterations produced in the living, we have to consider those occasioned by fermentations in the dead. When life has retreated by slow degrees from all the parts of an organized being; when, after all partial deaths have occurred, total death has possessed the depths of the subject, and broken all the springs of its activity, the work of putrefaction begins. Its task is to unmake this body, to destroy its forms, and dissever its materials. The work to be done is to disorganize it, to reduce it into solids, liquids, and gases, fit to go back again into the vast reservoir whence new life is incessantly issuing. This is the task that heat, moisture, air, and germs, will undertake in unison. It is all performed with steady diligence. Nature knows no delays; as soon as the body is cold, the protecting coating that covers