Whooping cough : its pathology and treatment a prize essay, to which the Medical Society of London awarded the Fothergillian Gold Medal for 1881 / by Thomas M. Dolan.

  • Dolan, Thomas M. (Thomas Michael), 1844-1907.
Date:
1882
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Whooping cough : its pathology and treatment a prize essay, to which the Medical Society of London awarded the Fothergillian Gold Medal for 1881 / by Thomas M. Dolan. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    to cure the disease. Empirical experience proved that this form of treatment was sometimes useful, but underlying such experience we find a substratum of truth. Lister uses carbolic acid, thymol-antiseptics, in a word, to destroy the germs which give rise to putrefactive change. The old woman who first recommended that children should be taken to gas-works was unconsciously acting on the principles of antisepticism. The germs or fungoid spores which cause whooping-cough do not flourish well amongst the products of gas manufacture. Science and superstition here meet on the same ground. It is an axiom in logic and philosophy that when several explanations are offered to account for any phenomenon, it is always better to choose the simplest. In classing whooping- cough among the fungoid diseases I am acting on this sound principle. 1. It is simple. 2. It is in harmony with ascertained facts. 3. It explains many of the phenomena. 4. It has been and may be verified. It is more than a scientific use of the imagination to ascribe whooping-cough to a germ or a microbe. § 8. Previous Experiments in this Direction. Walshe tells us that the infective activity of the secretion in pertussis would appear from recent experiments to be scarcely questionable. Letzerich states he has succeeded in producing whooping- cough in rabbits, by inoculating the trachea with the sputa of the human subject. These sputa, he maintains, always con- tain fungi. So far back as 1867, M. Poulet1 is said to have found in the moisture of patients suffering from whooping-cough what were then termed Infusoria, belonging to the class Bacterium- bacillus. Binz also believed that the disease was dependent upon the reception and further development of some form of fungus, 1 Lancet, 1S68, vol. i. p. 92.