The Pacific commercial advertiser. [volume] (Honolulu, Hawaiian Islands) 1856-1888, 1878-03-30
Professor Tyndall on the Spread of
Disease,

In proposing a vote of thanks to DIR. Corfeld
for his recent lecture on Infectious Diseases, Pro
fessor Tyndall paid a high compliment to the
lecturer for the thoroughly sound instruction
which he had SO clearly conveyed. He had made
it plain that contagiOn consisted, not of gas or
vapor, but of definite particles, sometimes float
ing in gas, in the air we breathed, or in the
water we drank; and that, like organic seeds in
tue soil, they multiplied themselves indefinitely
in suitable media, the great probability being
that these disease-producing particles were living
things. y close study of the subject, extending
now over several years, enabled him to agree
entirely with the lecturer in the parallelism
which he had declared to exist between the
phenomena Of contagious disease and the phe-
nomena of ordinary putrefaction. The case of
flies. for example, to which the lecturer ascribed
the power of communicating disease from one
person to another, was exactly paralleled by
phenomena in putrelaction. Chop up a beef
steak, steep it in water, raise the temperature a
little above the temperature of the blood, pour
off the water, and filter it you get a perfectly
clear liquid but that liquid placed in a bottle
and exposed to the air soon begins to get turbid,
and that turbid liquid, under the microscope, is
found to be swarming with living organisms. BY
suitably heating this perfectly clear beef-tea, it
can be sterilized, everything being killed which
is capable of generating those little organisms
which produce the turbidity and by keeping it
from coming in contact with the floating parti-
cles of the air, it might be preserved transparent
for years. He had now some sterilized beef-tea
of this sort which had been preserved for eighteen
months in a state of perfect transparency. But
if a fly dipped its foot into an adjacent vessel
containing some of the turbid fluid, and then
into the transparent fluid, that contact would be
sufficient to infect the sterilized infusion. In
torty-eight hours the clear liquid would be
swarmlng with these living organisms. The
quantity OF the turbid liquid which attaches
itself to the finest needlepoint suffces to infect
any amount of the infusion, just as the vaccine
taken up on the point of a surgeons
lancet spreads disease through the whole body.
Here, also, as in the case of contagious disease,
there was a period of incubation. In proof OF
what the lecturer had stated that the contagicn
of these communicable diseases was not gaseous
or liquid, but solid particles, he would describe
an experiment he had made only q few weeks
since. Eighteen months ago he had a chamber
prepared from which all floating particles of dust
were removed, and in it he placed a number of
vessels containing animal and vegetable refuse
which soon fell into putrefaction, and also two or
three vessels containing perfectly clear beef-tea
and mutton-broth, as transparent as water, in
which the iniective particles had been killed by
heat. Although all these vessels had stood for
eighteen months side by side there had been no
communication Of contagion from one to the
The beef-tea and mutton-broth remained
as transparent as when put in, though the other
vessels emitted a most noisome stencil. But il a
bubble were produced in one of the putrefying
masses by blowing into it, and if on rising to