I INFLAMMATION, SUPPURATION, AND BLOOD-POISONING PATHOLOGY, the study of the causes and products of diseases, is a younger science than physiology: the use of the microscope was the beginning of pathology; and the microscope, even so late as sixty years ago, was very different to the microscope now. The great pathologists of that time had not the lenses, microtomes, and reagents that are now in daily employment; they knew nothing of the present methods of section-cutting and differential straining. But the publication in 1839 of Schwann's cell-theory marks the rise of modern pathology. In 1843, Darwin wrote his first draft of the doctrine of the origin of species; and Pasteur, that year, was in for his examination at the Ecole Normale. The work of Schwann, Virchow, and Pasteur had such profound influences on science that the span of sixty years seems to cover the modern development of pathology: and this span of years is marked, half-way, by the rise of bacteriology. In 1875, when the Royal Commission on Experiments on Animals was held in London, the evidence was concerned practically with physiology alone: very little was said about pathology, and of bacteriology hardly a word. The witnesses say that they "believe they are beginning to get an idea" of the true nature of tubercle: and the evidence as to the nature of anthrax, given by Sir John Simon, reads now like a very old prophecy :-- We are going through a progressive work that has many stages, and are now getting more precise knowledge of the contagium. By these experiments on sheep it has been made quite clear that the contagium of sheep-pox is something of which the habits can be studied, as the habits of a fern or a moss can be studied and we look forward to opportunities of thus studying the contagium outside the body which it infects. This is not a thing to be done in a day, or perhaps in ten years, but must extend over a long period of time. Dr Klein's present paper represents one very important stage of a vast special study. He gives the identification of the contagium as something which he has studied to the end in the infected body, and which can now in a future stage be studied outside the body." Thirty years ago, there was no bacteriology, in the present sense of the word: and now the "habits" of these "contagia" have been studied, outside and inside the body, with amazing accuracy. It has been proved, past all possibility of doubt, that the pathogenic bacteria are the cause of infective diseases; they have fulfilled Koch's postulates --that they should be found in the diseased tissues, |