Excerpt from Epidemic Man and His Visitations

There are also diseases which shed their morbid products outwardly, and which can come from body to body, as smallpox, typhoid fever, consumption, influenza, cholera, etc., etc. Their products can be the causes of fresh cases, and the parasitic life, if any, which accompanies them can be such a cause, as experiment seems to show. Both infection and contagion are potent here. You can cultivate bacilli out of the body, generations of them, and inserting them into another body produce a disease, whether the first disease that produced the bacilli, or another. You have played with the cause: is the effect the same?

In the expectoration from tubercles you have, besides the bacilli, masses of morbid products which are excreted. In Cholera, besides its microbes, you have excretions generally on a large scale. Do the bacilli alone count as causative, or are the entire excreta to be so reckoned? Medicine concentrates attention chie¿y, if not entirely, on the micro-organisms. They are the zoological gardens of the microscopes of the pathologists.

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