Parasites: A Treatise on the Entozoa of Man and Animals: Including Some Account of the EctozoaCobbold, T. Spencer (Thomas Spencer)
Science
Parasites: A Treatise on the Entozoa of Man and Animals: Including Some Account of the Ectozoa
Cobbold, T. Spencer (Thomas Spencer)
Helminths; Parasites
On the 8th of April, 1876, I received from Dr William Roberts, of
Manchester, some capillary tubes, charged with blood, obtained from a
patient suffering from chyluria. The tubes had been transmitted by Dr
Bancroft, of Brisbane, Queensland, Australia; and in fulfilment of the
donor’s request, Dr Roberts afforded me an opportunity of examining
their contents, he having himself verified Bancroft’s statement
that they contained Filariæ. It was not until May 22nd that I found
opportunity to confirm the observations of Drs Bancroft and Roberts. The
contents of some of the tubes had by this time completely dried up; but
in others, to which diluted glycerine had been added, the blood appeared
tolerably fresh. In what might be reckoned as the sixth part of the
contents of one of the tubes, spread on a glass slide, I detected about
twenty Filariæ, three of which I sketched _in sitû_, in order to compare
them with the figures of Lewis, and also with others that I had procured
from my _Bilharzia_-patient in the year 1870. There could not, I
thought, be any doubt as to the identity of all these sexually-immature
nematoids. One novelty, however, presented itself in the presence of a
solitary and empty egg envelope, measuring about 1/500 of an inch in
its long diameter, and thus corresponding precisely with the ova that I
obtained from the urine in my _Bilharzia_ case.
According to Bancroft, chyluria is somewhat common in Brisbane; and the
case here brought forward was not the only one of the kind which had
already furnished Filariæ in the blood. The patient was a little girl
ten years of age.
Thus stood the facts in the spring of 1876. Having informed Dr
Bancroft that a nematoid egg had been detected in the Australian blood
transmitted to England, he was induced to make further investigations.
These happily resulted in the discovery of the adult worm; the
circumstances attending the “find” being recorded by Dr Bancroft in a
letter written to myself and dated from Brisbane, Queensland, April
20th, 1877. He wrote as follows:--“I have labored very hard to find the
parental form of the parasite, and am glad to tell you that I have now
obtained five specimens of the worm, which are waiting to be forwarded
by a trustworthy messenger.
“I have on record about twenty cases of this parasitic disease, and
believe it will be the solution of chyluria, one form of hæmaturia, one
form of spontaneous lymphatic abscess, a peculiar soft varix of the
groin, a hydrocele containing chylous fluid, together with some forms
of varicocele and orchitis. These I have verified. In the colony there
are no cases that I can find of elephantine leg, scrotal elephantiasis,
or lymph scrotum; but from the description of these diseases in the
volume on skin and other diseases of India by Fox, Farquhar, and Carter,
and from Wm. Roberts’ article on the latter in his volume on urinary
diseases, I am of opinion that the parasitic nature of the same will be
established.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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