Part 71

Huon tells of a cow bought to furnish milk for calves used to raise vaccine. She stood the tuberculin test, and was carefully secluded from all other cattle, but soon began to fall off, and in six months was very much emaciated, responded to the tuberculin test, and when killed showed extensive tuberculosis. Her caretaker at the vaccine establishment had what was believed to be chronic bronchitis, but when he died, soon after, this was found to be extensive pulmonary tuberculosis.

Bollinger inoculated a three-months’ calf with liquid from human tubercle and killed it seven months later. Fibroid pedunculated tumors, from a pea to a walnut in size, hung from the mesentery and spleen, and the mesenteric and retroperitoneal glands were tubercular.

Footnote 10:

Münchener medicinische Wochenschrift, 1894.

Sidney Martin furnishes the following: Four calves were fed 70 c.c. of sputum containing a large number of bacilli. Three were killed after four, eight, and twelve months respectively, and had severally 53, 63 and 13 nodules on the small intestine, mostly on Peyers’ patches. Two calves received at one dose 440 c.c. of tuberculous sputum, and were severally killed after eight and nineteen weeks. The first had tubercular nodules in the intestine and mesenteric glands.

Footnote 11:

Report of Royal Commission of 1895.

Frothingham injected into the peritoneum of two calves, three and thirteen weeks old, a culture of tubercle bacilli isolated one year before from the liver of a child. Slight local nodules were produced, some like spontaneous tubercle, others granulation tissue.

Theobald Smith inoculated sputum into the chest and abdomen of the following:

1. A yearling heifer, which was killed two months later and showed on the pleura near the seat of infection a mass of tubercles, one by one and a half inch in diameter, with partly caseated centres; also a nodule one-eighth of an inch on the right lung, and small tubercles attached to the diaphragm and omentum.

2. A yearling injected in the same way showed in two months on the diaphragm a mass of tubercles two inches in diameter, and a second mass one inch in diameter on the ribs near the seat of infection. Microscopical examination failed to detect bacilli, but there is no evidence that they were sought by culture or inoculation.

3. A cow injected in the chest and killed after two months showed tubercles of the lungs, pleura, and mediastinal glands, partly caseated and containing bacilli. Vascular fringes hung from the pleura.

4. A cow receiving a chest injection of sputum culture and killed in two months showed fringes and pendulous masses on the pleura, with small tubercles containing cheesy matter and a few bacilli.

Footnote 12:

Journal of Experimental Medicine, 1898, vol. iii. p. 482.

Crookshank injected tubercular sputum into the peritoneum of a calf, which died of streptococcus infection on the forty-second day. It showed extensive tubercular deposits in the seat of injection and an abscess the size of a walnut. Nodular fleshy neoplasms in hundreds studded the mesentery, omentum, liver, spleen, and diaphragm, and small tubercles disseminated through the lungs and liver contained tubercle bacilli. Three abscesses contained streptococci.

Footnote 13:

Transactions of the Pathological Society of London, 1891, p. 332.

The experimental inoculations of cattle with sputum by T. Smith, Kruse, and Adami showed a decided lack of potency in the bovine system, but (1) they do not show that the germ at once perishes in the system of cattle; (2) they do not prove that this germ, if returned from the ox to man, would prove less pathogenic than if carried from man to man without the intervention of the ox. (3) The observations of Bollinger, Baumgarten, and Crookshank show that under certain conditions the sputum bacillus can and does produce generalized tuberculosis in cattle. (4) Diminished pathogenesis of the germ when passed from man to cattle is no guarantee that this germ, or the slightly modified germ of casual bovine tuberculosis will prove equally mild if transferred from the bovine to the human patient.

Cases of Infection of Man from Ox. Tscherning, of Copenhagen, attended a young veterinarian who had cut his finger in dissecting a tuberculous cow. The skin wound healed in three weeks, but a subcutaneous swelling persisted, an ulcer formed, and a tuberculous mass containing bacilli was removed. No secondary tubercles formed. A parallel case occurred to a prominent American veterinarian. The diseased tissue was excised and the bacilli identified by the bacteriologist of the university with which the patient was connected, and a permanent recovery ensued.

Footnote 14:

Nocard. Dictionnaire de Med. Veterinaire. Article, Tuberculosis.

Pfeiffer, of Weimar, attended a veterinarian who had been similarly inoculated from a tuberculous cow. The patient, aged thirty-four years, had a good constitution and no tuberculous taint. The cutaneous lesion healed, but six months later there was tuberculosis in the cicatrix; pulmonary tuberculosis followed, and the patient died of this two years later. At the necropsy were found tubercular arthritis of the wounded thumb and many vomicæ in the lungs.

Footnote 15:

Zeitschrift für Hygiene, Band iii.

The post-mortem wart (tuberculosis verrucosa cutis) is familiar to surgeons as occurring in butchers and tanners, and there is every presumption that in many cases this is of bovine origin (Martin du Magny, Hanot, Senn, Riehl, Paltauf, Osier). Gerber testifies that in exceptional cases this extends to the lymph-glands and becomes generalized.

Dr. Stang, of Amorbach, had a five-year-old, finely developed boy patient, of healthy parents, destitute of hereditary taint. He died after a few weeks’ illness with miliary tuberculosis of the lungs and enormously enlarged tubercular mesenteric glands. The cow which supplied his milk had been killed a short time before with pulmonary tuberculosis.

Footnote 16: