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8
In the same year Chateaubriand, writing to Fontanes, announcing the
death of Madame de Beaumont, complains that he is in great difficulty, because
he had hoped to obtain 2,000 crowns by the sale of his carriages, but " by a
law of the time of the Goths, phthisis is declared in Rome a contagious
disease," and as Madame de Beaumont rode in his carriages nobody was willing
to buy them.
1830. Schonlein first used the term " tuberculosis."
A.D. 1839. Georges Sand, travelling in Spain and its islands with Chopin,
then suffering from the disease to which he succumbed ten years later, had just
settled down in Majorca. " At the end of a month," she writes, " poor Chopin,
who had a cough since we left Paris, became worse, we sent for a doctor—two
doctors—three doctors—each more stupid than the other, who started to spread
the news in the island that the sick man was a consumptive in the last stage.
As a result there was great alarm. Phthisis is rare in these climates, and is
looked upon as contagious. We were regarded as plague infected, and
furthermore as heathens as we did not go to Mass. The owner of the little
house which we had rented turned us out brutally, and wished to bring an
action against us to limewash his house, which he said we had infected." At
Barcelona iust as they were leaving the inn, the landlord demanded that they
should pay for the bed on the pretext that it was infected, and that the police
regulations required that it should be burnt.
A.D. 1843. Klencke afforded the first experimental proof that phthisis
was communicable by injecting tubercular matter into the jugular vein of a
rabbit, and finding tuberculosis twenty-six weeks later in its liver and lungs.
A.D. 1857. Pasteur in his researches into the process of fermentation
showed that it is a correlative of life, being the work of microscopic living
organisms; and it was his investigations which led to Lister's researches in
antiseptic surgery, which in turn led up to Koch's great discovery at a later
period.
A.D. 1865. Villemin, Professor at Val-de-Grace, demonstrated by a
series of unexceptionable experiments on rabbits, guinea pigs, and dogs, that
tuberculosis can be transmitted from man to animals :—for instance that if a
small portion of tubercular matter, such as expectoration from a consumptive,
is introduced under the skin into the peritoneal cavity, and into the trachea of an
animal, tuberculosis will be found on killing it a few weeks later in the lungs
or other organs.