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Scientific Memoirs by

contaminations being hitherto unknown, it has been impossible to conjecture
how such might differ in detail from the bacterial. A hematoid (filarial) blood-
contamination shows, indeed, the tendency to persist with exacerbating intervals,
but its nature and parasitism are essentially diverse; and a fit comparison can
be made only with the trichomonous infection of equines, described elsewhere
as being attended with wasting, recurrent pyrexia, and occasional lesion limited
to the vascular area proper. Study of the spirillum fever led me to remark
that that pyrexial symptoms, clinically insisted on, are really more contingent
than the visible blood-state; and this statement will apply, upon evidence sub-
mitted, even more forcibly, to the malarial disease. The datum seems, indeed,
to be comprehensive, and accordingly ‘ague’ may be defined as a zooic blood-
contamination prope cum febre : pyrexial events, however prominent, being but
subordinate incidents, whose conditions of occurrence become the proper sub-
ject of curative medicine: biology here blending, as it were, with pathology
and therapeutics.

     In the absence of autopsies, I have no fresh information respecting the
fundamental splenic and hepatic lesions of the malarial infection: from other
sources (vide Note above, p. 152) it appears that pigmented organisms, free
and involved within phagocytes, accumulate in the organs named; and their
power of reproduction persisting, thence a source of future growths and clinical
manifestations. Such accumulation seems to be a special febrile concomitant,
attended with vascular and changes clinically detectible: for at
non-febrile periods organisms visibly abounded in the blood for days, without
the abdominal organs being unusually swollen or tender. Particular implication,
in ague, of the spleen and liver, may be due mainly to their office in the forma-
tion and destruction of blood-corpuscles, which here are the peculiar site of
parasitic infection: yet it is noteworthy that the lymphatic system of glands,
even the bronchial, is not simultaneously excited; and hence a question if entry
of the infecting agent by the prima via and portal venous apparatus be not
also indicated here (and in some other acute infections) by such predominant
irritation of certain abdominal organs.

     The production, in ague, of dark pigment seems indicative, not only of a
special character of the hæmatozoa, but also of a concurrent metabolism
extrinsic to them. Within organisms, the minute pigment-particles appear
very early, and move and multiply so quickly as almost to suggest their living
nature: enlarging somewhat, their regular form is maintained with an activity
more evidently imparted; and thence in ordinary cases, no more is seen than
the ready disappearance of pigment along with other marks of blood-contami-
nation. But in severe attacks the formation of ‘melanine’ is so copious as to
lead to the production of comparatively large, opaque, irregular or angular (or
quasi-crystalline) masses, which impart a striking aspect to the leucocyte or