Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 59.djvu/476

466 Of the experiments which I have carried out during the last two years along with Professor Schütz of the Veterinary College in Berlin I will tell you briefly some of the most important.

A number of young cattle which had stood the tuberculin test, and might therefore be regarded as free from tuberculosis, were infected in various ways with tubercle bacilli taken from cases of human tuberculosis; some of them got the tuberculous sputum of consumptive patients direct. In some cases the tubercle bacillus or the sputum was injected under the skin, in others into the peritoneal cavity, in others into the jugular vein. Six animals were fed with tuberculous sputum almost daily for seven or eight months; four repeatedly inhaled great quantities of bacilli, which were distributed in water and scattered with it in the form of spray. None of these cattle (there were 19 of them) showed any symptoms of disease and they gained considerably in weight. From six to eight months after the beginning of the experiments they were killed. In their internal organs not a trace of tuberculosis was found. Only at the places where the injections had been made small suppurative foci had formed, in which few tubercle bacilli could be found. This is exactly what is found when dead tubercle bacilli are injected under the skin of animals liable to contagion. So the animals we experimented on were affected by the living bacilli of human tuberculosis exactly as they would have been by dead ones; they were absolutely insusceptible to them.

The result was utterly different, however, when the same experiment was made on cattle free from tuberculosis with tubercle bacilli that came from the lungs of an animal suffering from bovine tuberculosis. After an incubation-period of about a week the severest tuberculous disorders of the internal organs broke out in all the infected animals. It was all one whether the infecting matter had been injected only under the skin or into the peritoneal cavity or the vascular system. High fever set in and the animals became weak and lean; some of them died after from one and a half to two months; others were killed in a miserably sick condition after three months. After death extensive tuberculous infiltrations were found at the place where the injections had been made and in the neighboring lymphatic glands, and also far advanced alterations of the internal organs, especially of the lungs and the spleen. In the cases in which the injection had been made into the peritoneal cavity the tuberculous growths which are so characteristic of bovine tuberculosis were found on the omentum and peritoneum. In short, the cattle proved just as susceptible to infection by the bacillus of bovine tuberculosis as they have proved insusceptible to infection by the bacillus of human tuberculosis. I wish only to add that preparations of the organs of the cattle which were artificially infected with bovine tuberculosis in these experiments are exhibited in the museum of pathology and bacteriology.