Jasper County Democrat, Volume 4, Number 13, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 6 July 1901 — SMALLPOX GERMS. [ARTICLE]

SMALLPOX GERMS.

Biflkultiw of Bacteriologists in Proving Mlcroblc Origin at Disease. It has always seemed odd, says The Hospital, thatthe bacteriologist has found it easier to prove the microbe origin, and thus, presumedly, the infective nature of a series of diseases which used not to be considered infectious at all, than to lay his hands upon the living germs, which, as we cannot hesitate to believe, must be the causes of the various eruptive fevers. Thus, to take extreme examples, while tuberculosis was dragged, into the category of the infections on the strength of the discovery of the bacillus tuberculosis, smallpox, the very type of an infectious disorder, declined to display the germ on which its infectivity depended. Sometime ago Dr. Monckton Copeman discovered a microbe in vaccinia, but even he failed to cultivate it, so that its claims to be regarded as the cause of the disease re-, mained somewhat uncertain. Now two papers on the subject are published simultaneously, one by Dr. Copeman and the other by Dr. M. I'unck, of Brussels? Dr. 'Copeman says that at last, by inclosing a small quantity of beef4»roth inoculated with a minute trace of vaccine lymph, free from extraneous microbes, in capsules, and placing these capsules with the peritoneal cavity of rabbits and dogs, he has been able to obtain a culture, numerous zooglea masses being visible, made up of bodies resembling spores. “Apparently they represent the resting stage of the specific microbe.” , Dr. Funck takes quite another line. He holds that vaccinia is not a microbic disease, but is caused by a protozoon, easily found in all vaccine; that the inoculation of this protozoon in a sterile emulsion reproduces in susceptible animals all the classical symptoms of vaccinia, and renders them refractory to subsequent inoculations with vaccine; that the variolous pustule contains a protozoon morphologically similar to thatin the vaccine, and from these facts he argues that vaccinia is but an attenuated form of variola, which, of course, is what is already pretty widely accepted, although on other grounds.