Feb.1

Aug.1

An account is given of twenty cases of trichinosis in Ober-Sachsenfeld, in Cunewald nineteen, and in Ober-Cunewald one hundred and fifty-three cases, to which is added a résumé of the recorded cases in trichinosis in Saxony from the time Trichina was discovered in man up to the present, and a summing up of the twenty-three hundred cases with thirty-five deaths. This is followed,123 by an enumeration of the various commissions that have been appointed for the inspection of meats since 1860, and the symptoms exhibited by the patients in the Cunewald epidemic of 1888. The debate in the Landtage on the petition for the establishment of an obligatory inspection of pork throughout Germany is also given. The article is replete with statistics relating to trichinosis. The order of the Minister of the Interior of Germany, issued July 21, regarding the method in which the obligatory examination of pork shall be carried on for the prevention of trichinosis, contains fourteen sections concerning the regulations of record books, character of microscopes to be used, appointment and pay of examiners, i.e., for each hog, one mark; for each examination of pork, ham or sausage, fifty pfennige. The examination of each hog must include six pieces of flesh, as follows-(a) from the columns of the diaphragm, (b) from the muscles of the diaphragm, (e) from the intercostal muscles, (d) from the abdominal muscles, (e) from the lumbar or laryngeal muscles, (f) from the tongue muscles. From each of these six pieces of flesh at least six preparations must be made, in the form of longitudinal sections one centimetre long by 0.5 centimetres broad, and thin enough for investigation. In the examination of ham and sausages three pieces of flesh are to be taken from different parts, and from each at least four preparations made. The tests of pork and meat should be made in the region of bones and tendons. Each Trichina examiner is limited to the examination of ten hogs in one day. The ordinance took effect September 1st.

BARBED-HEADED WORMS-ACANTHOCEPHALI.

50

Bd.8, No.17

Prof. B. Grassi and I. Calandruccio have added a new form to the long list of animal parasites infesting human beings. They give a description and figures of Echinorhyncus moniliformis (Bremser), with which Professor Calandruccio was himself afflicted,

having dislodged over fifty specimens from his intestine by means of ethereal extract of male fern.

Echinorhyncus occurs but seldom among mammals with the exception of Echinorhyncus gigus, which is rather frequent in hogs (40 per cent. in Catania). The above-named helminthologists have added to this a species in the small intestine of the dog, probably a new species; and another in the intestine of Mus decumanus (1 to 2 per cent.) and in Myoxus quercinus.

This last parasite, Echinorhyncus moniliformis, was also found to have a very common beetle (Blaps mucronata, Lat.) as its intermediate host. Several hundred young of Echinorhyncus moniliformis were found in a single Blaps; they were encysted and visible to the naked eye. Upon being given to white rats, previously ascertained to be free from parasites, they developed in the course of a year into adult specimens of Echinorhyncus about one centimetre in length.

Although the case of Professor Calandruccio is the first on record in which Echinorhyncus has been observed as a human parasite, its discoverers believe it to be common enough, from the habit which prevails to some extent among the peasantry of Catania and Egypt of eating its intermediate host, Blaps.

682

V.4,No.12
1

FLY PARASITES.

Sven Lampa,,650 after criticising the common habit of omitting to rear and determine the species of fly larvæ found in the human intestine, describes a case where numerous larvæ passed in the dejections, proved to belong to the flies Aricia (Homalomyia) scalrais, Fab.; Aricia manicata, Meig; and Aricia incisurata, Zett.

84

Mar.10

Prof. Dr. Rembold exhibited at the February meeting of the Verein der Aerzte in Steiermark some larvæ of Anthomyia which he had found in the dejection of one patient, and in the urine of another patient suffering from hemiplegia and having a wound in the neighborhood of the genitals.

An instance is recorded, of the fly Lucilia nobilis depositing its eggs in the human ear, producing suppurative discharges by the external meatus and Eustachian tube, and, upon syringing, a large number of maggots, which were reared to the adult insects. Jabez Hogg refers to the reported cases in which maggots

22

May

22 May 16

in carious teeth are expelled by the inhalation of fumes of henbane seeds or of tobacco or by other means. He calls attention to the fact that these supposed larval entozoa usually prove to be shreds of tissue or lymph detached from inflamed gums, or spiral fibres from some vegetable, as, for instance, celery, capillary segments of the orange, etc., and that physicians should keep this fact in mind when told that worms have been seen to drop out of the mouth of the patient after the inhalation of the fumes of certain drugs.

DISEASES OF THE KIDNEYS, BLADDER, AND

SUPRARENAL CAPSULES.

BY JAMES TYSON, M.D.,

AND

ALLEN J. SMITH, M.D.,

PHILADELPHIA.

BRIGHT'S DISEASE.

3

J.18

Etiology.-Gaucher, in a paper on the "Pathogeny of Bright's Disease" before the Société Médicale des Hôpitaux, says the excessive introduction into the organism or the exaggerated production in it of extractive matters is the ordinary pathogenic condition of the large white kidney. The exaggerated introduction by the ingestions of meats, beef extracts, etc., or the excessive production of extractive matters, suffices of itself to produce the epithelial form of Bright's disease; but if chronic nephritis produced by any cause had existed, the defective elimination of extractive matters will aggravate the renal lesion.

59

Mar.24

The possibility of malaria being the cause of Bright's disease has received considerable support from a paper read by Charles S. Wood before the Northwestern Medical and Surgical Society, of New York. He based this on his own experience and that of other home and foreign authorities, among whom he mentioned Blackhall, Chénoriard, Nieret, Long, Rosenstein, Soldaton, MacLean, Park, Dickinson, Busey, Da Costa, Loring, Pepper, Clemens. He might have added the authority of all who have had any experience with this subject or given any thought to it.

527 Nov.26, 87

Paul Snyers, of Liége, submits the following conclusions, deduced from his experiments upon albuminuria and renal lesions following upon the injections of albumen: 1. The albuminous dyscrasia determined by the injection of the white of egg is transitory and ceases twenty-four hours after the injection. The albumen found in the urine is only white of egg albumen injected. It is a useless substance, which traverses the organism and is eliminated naturally by the kidney without producing lesion.

2. The histological examination of the kidney shows no lesions, even if the injections have lasted thirty days. 3. The fact that the injection of the white of egg produces only transitory albuminuria shows that it is not only incapable of producing the lesions of nephritis, but even pathological albuminuria. These conclusions are contrary to those arrived at by the eminent Italian physician, Semmola, who claims to have found a chemical and molecular alteration in the blood, which becomes the cause of the diverse lesions of the kidney. A committee of the Academy of Medicine of Brussels appointed to examine the paper of Snyers reported as follows: 1. There is an antagonism between the results of Semmola and Snyers, and this fact alone requires new and more numerous experiments. 2. It seems that the nature of the albumen employed in these injections would be of importance in judging of the results obtained, and ought perhaps to explain the albuminuria so frequent in infectious and certain nervous diseases. 3. In certain details of the experiment of Snyers there seems to have been some trace of lesions or alterations in the circulatory apparatus.

Oppenheim, adds to four cases of acute nephritis after varicella published by Henoch in 1884 and a contribution by Jansen on this subject, such a case under his own care, with the object of showing that this axiom is not so rare as might appear, and that varicella, therefore, is not necessarily so harmless an affection as is commonly supposed. His patient was a five-year-old, well-nourished child, which after some days of loss of appetite, broke out with a copious varicella eruption on the twenty-first of September, chiefly in the head and both arms, later upon the legs, and to a less degree upon the rest of the body. The temperature was 38° C. (1004° F.), but the child was not otherwise ill and he was simply put to bed. On the eighth day at the doctor's visit the mother showed him a dark-brown urine thick with sediment. contained a large amount of albumen, a few blood-corpuscles, casts and epithelium, and had a specific gravity of 1040. Edema was never present. He prescribed simple diet of milk, rest in bed, sweating baths, and internally tannic acid and bicarbonate of sodium. Eight days later the urine was clear, free from albumen, copious instead of scanty, while the night urine was still scanty, of dark color, and albuminous. Eight days later the urine was entirely free from abnormal constituents and the patient recovered.

It