12
Scientific Memoirs by
All direct evidence of such a process of penetration is, however, wanting, for the
most careful examination of numerous sections of the intestinal walls failed in
every instance to show any evidence of special accumulations of commas in their
thickness. It is, of course, possible that the period of transit may have preceded
that at which death took place, or that transference only occurred in the case of
a very few commas which subsequently by processes of multiplication gave origin
to the multitudes ultimately present within the cavity of the intestinal canal.
There remains, further, the possibility that the transit may have taken place, not by
a process of general diffusion, but by the agency of, special carrier-protoplasts,
which, after taking up the commas by ingestion while within the peritoneal cavity,
subsequently traversed, the walls of the intestinal tube and died within its cavity,
freeing their bacillar contents in a condition fit for processes of rapid growth and
multiplication. That such a process of transit actually did occur, to some extent
at all events, in these cases is rendered probable by the phenomena presented by
the iliac mucus in Experiment 1. In this, as previously mentioned, numerous
bodies, similar to those pointed out by Drs. Klein and Gibbes as occurring
in choleraic media, were present. These consisted of large nuclear bodies, with
more or less evident remains of cell protoplasm around them, in which numbers
of small bacilli were present. These were, however, in this instance unequivo-
cally minute commas and not straight bacilli as in the choleraic media. (Plate I,
fig. 3.) The results of the experiments in any case appear definitely to deter-
mine that by some means or other actual transit of schizomycete organisms from
the tissues outside the intestinal tube to the interior of it may take place so as to
give rise to conspicuous effects there without it being possible to obtain any
direct evidence of the occurrence of the process.
But another important fact is established by these experiments for all those
who assume that the choleraic commas are the actual cause of cholera. The ex-
periments clearly show that pathogenic effects may arise as the result of the
access of these bacilli to the lymphatic system, and that therefore the site
of primary infection in cases of cholera need not necessarily be the digestive
tract. It may, of course, be urged that spreading lymphatic invasion, such as
was present in these cases, is not a phenomenon normal to cholera, and that it is
therefore one aside of the question as regards the invasion of the system in
that disease. This objection, however, ceases to carry any weight when
we recollect that as an ultimate outcome of this lymphatic invasion we have the
access of commas to the interior of the intestinal canal and their extensive
multiplication within it ; for, even granting that the true choleraic condition is only
initiated by such processes, the fact remains that they may be due, not to direct
invasion of the interior of the digestive tract by the ingestion of materials from
the external world, but to invasion from the surrounding tissues.
The question regarding the cause of the immunity of two of the animals
experimented with must in the meantime remain a subject for conjecture only.
The immunity must clearly have been due either to special conditions in the