Page 121 - My FlipBook

the tail and the tail will die progressively up to the body
and then the body will die until the life of the mouse has ^one
out, so virulent is this poison.
So we might relate case after case of various classes of
microbic poisoning, how it is that they produce disease by
being slowly and continuously instilled into the body, some
of them very slowly, some of them seeming to produce no
considerable depression of the nervous system. For in-
stance, we may take tuberculosis. Here the patient may go
on for years and not be very sick, or they may be very ill.
There is no special difficulty wdth the nervous system. They
will go on until the lungs are broken dowai, so that life is
destroyed from the w^ant of breathing capacity, pure and
simple ; thoroughly a different class of symptoms, and yet
destroying life with the same certainty, but by destroying
tissue, destroying certain parts rather than by any poison-
ing of the general system.
These cases I relate to cause you to think upon this sub-
ject, how it is that these results are produced by the
physiological processes and the changing of the normal con-
stituents of the tissues and tissue juices into poisonous chem-
ical compounds— ^the mode or method of the production of
disease by micro-organisms, by the leucomains or by the
toxins, because we include these as well.
The tox-albumins are different, and I may say that the
studies of the tox-albumins are not so well advanced as the
studies of the toxins and leucomains. Now% the tox-albu-
mins are not properly a waste product of micro-organisms;
in another sense possibly they are. They are albuminous in
their nature and they are very difficult to isolate and get pure.
They seem not to exist except in some peculiar construction
of albumin, consequently w^e always obtain them as an albu-
min, not as a powder or a crystalline substance. They were
discovered first by Vaughn, then of the University of Michi-
gan. This name tox-albumin perhaps is not so generally
accepted as the other names of which I have spoken. They
seem not to produce any result until after the death of the
micro-organism. They exist only in the body of the micro-
organism and the micro-organism must die and go into solu-
tion before this poison produces its effect. Now, you may
imagine that it is pretty difficult in the study of diseased con-

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