Read in the Section of Practice of Medicine and Materia Medica, May, 1884.
At this, the noon of micro-organific light, it would be a breach of order in medical authorship to touch the intra-thorax without a temerarious parade of one's knowledge of the bacillus tuberculosis. But in these halcyon days of elaborate reviews, retrospects, weekly couriers, records, bulletins, and budgets, almost universally distributed to members of the profession through the advertising and enterprising ingenuity of medical publishers, few, if any, of us could come here other than replete with knowledge and opinion of this much-discussed organism.
To dispel the incubus of your apprehensions I shall begin by promising not to subject you to the tedium of a bacteriologist. Though not assuming such proportions, I shall not avoid a casual notice of this "idea of the season."
When Koch, the great apostle of bacterian pathology, made known the results of his