CONSUMPTION AN INFECTIOUS DISEASE.

Globe, Volume IV, Issue 399, 22 September 1875, Page 3

CONSUMPTION AN INFECTIOUS DISEASE.

[From the Times.] It is now many years since a physician of great genius, Dr William Budd, whose career of usefulness has, unhappily been interrupted by broken health, declared his belief that consumption was an infectious, self-propagating, or, as it would technically be called, a zymotic disease, differing from the infectious fevers chiefly in the slowness of its progress, and in the long period of latency which might follow exposure to contagion. He founded this opinion very much upon the natural history of the malady as it had been observed in the Sandwich Islands and in other isolated places in which it had not existed prior to its introduction by European voyagers and settlers. In such places it had exhibited a virulence previously unknown, but precisely parallel to that of smallpox among the American aborigines, or to that of the infectious fevers generally when communicated to any new race. Dr Budd's opiuion was not favorably received by medical men, although he himself, looking at the facts even ol English practice by the light of this interpretation of them, never wavered in it, and was wont to declare that consumption might be extinguished in ten years by the aid of certain restrictions and of certain sanitary regulations. The data before him, although they carried conviction to his own mind, were not sufficiently precise in their nature to produce, or possibly even to warrant, a similar conviction in the minds of others, and his belief remained without influence for the public good. Iu 18G8, however, M. Villemin announced that he had discovered by experiment that tubercle, the diseased product which forms the basis of consumption, was capable of being communicated by inoculation to guineapigs and other animals, and again from these artificially diseased animals to healthy ones, so that for the first time the conditions governing the propagation and development of the malady could be separated from the uncertain surroundings of human life and occupations, and could be made the subjects of rigorous experiment and scientific observation. The conclusions of M. Villemin were soon confirmed—and had even in some degree been anticipated—by many fellow-labourers ; and then for the first time in the history of the human race, a number of competent inquirers set themselves to study the whole subject of the commencement and progress of consumption —to separate from it all. that was accidental or non-essential, to find out how the deposition of tubercle was begun and carried on, and how its formation might be caused or prevented, promoted, or arrested. In the course of the investigation doubts arose with regard to the nature of certain appearances, and these doubts could only be removed by subjecting healthy textures to a more careful scrutiny than had ever been made of them before. We have uo means of knowing how many rats, and rabbits, and guinea pigs were sacrificed in the necessary experiments, and we have no doubt that the number was considerable. But, already, before the lapse of seven years from M. Villemin's discovery, the veil of mystery which previously hung over the causes and nature of consumption has been removed. It is ascertained that the disease belongs, as Dr Budd conjectured, to the zymotic class ; that tubercle may either originate in the body, nnder the influence of the ferment generated by organic decomposition, or that it may be communicated by contagion; that, however arising, it has its seat in certain anatomical structures, and that it spreads from these along definite lines of march to others. The conclusions

already reached point to the high probability that other zymotic diseases may in like manner originate spontaneously under given conditions, and they also point to a near future—near, at least, if we measure time by the ordinary rate of the growth of knowledge—in which it will be within ihe power of medical science to banish consumption as utterly as it has already banished some of the diseases by which our forefathers w«re afflicted.