Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 69.djvu/234

230 appeared to decide the question in favor of the infective theory of tuberculosis. The numerous workers who repeated Villemin's experiments, after the same or modified methods, arrived at very contradictory results. The opponents of the infective theory strove to prove that true tuberculosis could be induced by inoculation with non-tubercular material. To the decision of this question Cohnheim and Salomonsen contributed largely by selecting for inoculation the anterior chamber of a rabbit's eye. The great advantage which this method possesses over all others arises from the fact that the course of a successful tubercular inoculation can be watched throughout by the experimenter until the pathological process has advanced so far that the whole organism—the neighboring lymphatic glands, the lungs, spleen, liver and kidneys—becomes tuberculous. A further point in favor of this method of inoculation is that spontaneous tuberculosis of the eye has never been observed in rabbits. It was reserved for the genius of Robert Koch to discover nearly twenty years later, in 1882, by the employment first of an original staining method, the tubercle bacillus in sections of tuberculous organs, and next by the use of a special method of artificial cultivation, to secure growths of the bacillus free from all admixture with extraneous matter. With these pure cultivations he succeeded, as you well know, in reproducing in certain domestic animals all the characteristic appearances of tuberculosis in man. Furthermore, Koch's studies of this period convinced him of the unity of causation of the various tubercular affections met with in man and also of those met with in the common domestic animals. Refusing to be daunted by the fact that tuberculosis tends to appear under different aspects in each species, and directing his attention not upon the gross appearances of the disease, but focusing it upon the microscopical appearances of the primary tubercle, which as he said recurs with typical regularity in all the different processes in man, Koch recognized the essential identity of the apparently widely different forms of tuberculosis in the various species of animals. It does not detract from the immense value of his work that Koch failed to distinguish between the tubercle bacilli isolated from the tubercular tissue in fowls, cattle and man. This failure was by no means accidental, for the possibility of the existence of differences in nature of the cultures depending upon their origins was clearly in his mind. Many of you will recall the long list of cultures which is given in the paper on tuberculosis published in 1884. In regard to this list Koch says: "It may cause some surprise that so relatively large a number of cultures was set on foot when a few would have sufficed for observing the behavior of bacilli in cultures. It seemed to me, however, not improbable that though bacilli from varying forms of tuberculosis—perlsucht, lupus, phthisis, etc., presented no differences microscopically, yet, that in cultures differences might become