Fungi: Their Nature and UsesCooke, M. C. (Mordecai Cubitt)
Science
Fungi: Their Nature and Uses
Cooke, M. C. (Mordecai Cubitt)
Fungi
This report is accompanied by fourteen large and well-executed plates,
each containing hundreds of figures of organic bodies collected from
the air between February and September. It is valuable both for its
evidence as to the number and character of the spores in the air, and
also for the tables showing the relation between five forms of
disease, and their fluctuations, as compared with the amount of spores
floating in the atmosphere.
We are fain to believe that we have represented the influence of fungi
on man as far as evidence seems to warrant. The presence of forms of
mould in some of their incipient conditions in different diseased
parts of the human body, externally and internally, may be admitted
without the assumption that they are in any manner the cause of the
diseased tissues, except in such cases as we have indicated. Hospital
gangrene may be alluded to in this connection, and it is possible that
it may be due to some fungus allied to the crimson spots (blood rain)
which occur on decayed vegetation and meat in an incipient stage of
decomposition. This fungus was at one time regarded as an algal, at
another as animal; but it is much more probable that it is a low
condition of some common mould. The readiness with which the spores of
fungi floating in the atmosphere adhere to and establish themselves on
all putrid or corrupt substances is manifest in the experience of all
who have had to do with the dressing of wounds, and in this case it is
a matter of the greatest importance that, as much as possible,
atmospherical contact should be avoided.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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