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
In 1857 Rainey described similar structures taken from the flesh of
swine; and, in his memoir, he went so far as to maintain that these
bodies were early stages of development of the common pork-measle.
In the year 1858 Gubler wrote an important paper on this subject, in
which he related a case where twenty cysts existed in the human liver.
The cysts were of great size, mostly as large as a hen’s egg, one of
them being some six inches in diameter. Naturally, the largest had
been diagnosed as an ordinary hydatid. However, on evacuating their
contents (post mortem), they were found to harbor enormous quantities
of minute corpuscles strictly analogous to those usually obtained
from psorospermial sacs. Gubler believed he had stumbled upon masses
of eggs of _Distoma hepaticum_, but in this he erred. Shortly after
Gubler’s discovery similar bodies from the human liver were described
by Virchow; and in 1862, the subject was followed up by Dr Dressler,
of Prague. Dressler found in the human liver a number of pea-shaped
bodies, the milky contents (_breisubstanz_) of which displayed a
multitude of the characteristic corpuscular elements referred to. These
particles, already considered as equivalent to, if not identical with,
the so-called pseudo-navicellæ of gregarinæ, were soon encountered by a
variety of independent observers. Thus, Leuckart noticed these bodies in
various animals; but with caution remarked:--“Concerning the nature of
these formations I will not decide. To be candid, however, it appears
to me to be in no way made out whether the psorospermiæ are to be
considered as the result of a special animal development, whether they,
like pseudo-navicellæ, are the nuclei of gregariniform productions, or
whether they are the final products of pathological metamorphosis.”
Leuckart found these organisms in the intestines of a trichinised dog,
also in a sheep and pig fed with Trichinæ. He also found them in the
muscles of another pig fed with psorosperms, and likewise in the liver
of various rabbits. He remarks that in swine these parasites are more
abundant than measles. They were present in five of eighteen pigs, and
also in two out of four sheep, whose flesh was especially examined.
The observations of Lindemann at Nischney-Novgorod are particularly
interesting. This medical officer discovered psorospermial sacs attached
to the hair of a girl who was being treated in hospital for chlorosis.
The sacs in question bore close resemblance to the bodies which we found
in abundance in diseased and healthy cattle. It would further appear,
from Lindemann’s observations, that the affection is not very uncommon
amongst the Russian peasants.
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