Treatment.
—All infected animals should be isolated and destroyed, their carcasses being burned. If possible, the infected wound or abrasion should be induced to bleed freely, and then cauterized with an active caustic. By prompt interference with the first manifestations it may be possible to cut short the disease. This would necessarily be done by excision, cauterization, packing, etc. Bayard Holmes has reported a case in which, during two and a half years of chronic manifestations of this disease, he anesthetized the patient twenty times for the purpose of opening new foci or scraping out old ones, finally obtaining a permanent cure. There is no specific treatment, but the septic symptoms should be combated as indicated in the chapter on Septicemia.
By making a glycerin extract from the filtered and evaporated culture of the glanders bacillus it is possible to prepare a toxalbumin analogous to tuberculin, which reacts in a similar way. By it animals may be fortified against inoculation, and by its use a peculiar reaction is produced in those affected by the disease. It is known as mallein, and by it are tested all horses used for the preparation of the diphtheria antitoxin, in order that all possibility of glanders may be eliminated. It is probable that it might be made of therapeutic value in treating the disease when actively present in man.
ANTHRAX.
Anthrax is more commonly known as splenic fever, malignant pustule, or woolsorters’ disease; in Germany as Milzbrand, and in France as charbon. It is an infectious disease of cattle, which has devastated many parts of Central Europe, and has been frequently met with on the Continent among men, though but rarely in the United States. All the domestic and nearly all the experimental animals are subject to it. Gronin has stated that in the district of Novgorod, in Russia, during four years more than 56,000 cattle and 528 men perished from anthrax. Poultry and dogs are not strictly immune, but possess a low susceptibility to the disease. It generally prevails in low districts and in marshy grounds.
The disease is the result of the invasion of the bacillus anthracis, which is a relatively large-sized bacillus, varying in breadth from 1 to 1¹⁄₂ and in length from 5 to 20 microns. It is easily cultivated outside the body, and multiplies with great rapidity in the bodies of susceptible animals; it is the type of spore-bearing bacilli, and is so readily recognized and worked with that it is commonly used in laboratory investigations. The demonstration of its specificity we owe to Davaine, in 1873, although he had described it in 1850.
PLATE IV
FIG. 1
Anthrax Bacilli. Spore Formation. (Karg and Schmorl.)