germ theory

1. Biol.: [BIOGENESIS.] 2. Pathol .: The theory that there exists for each definite disease of infectious origin a specific germ or pro to mycetes. Hauptmann, in the seventeenth century, suggested that epidemic diseases might be caused by the presence in the air of invisible germs, and since then many more or le plausible efforts have been made to explain the phenomena of contagion. In 1863, Dr. Beale advanced the theory that the active properties of vaccine lymph were contained in certain minute particles 8 inch in diameter, a theory which has since been shown to be correct. Dr. Braid wood and Mr. Vacher describe the contagion of measles as "sparkling, colorle bodies in the breath of patients," and Dr. Klein, in typhoid fever, has found minute organisms surrounding the affected intestinal glands. The blood of animals dead from splenic fever swarms with bacilli, which multiply and throw off spores that can be cultivated (as shown by the researches of Pasteur), and the crop continued from fluid to fluid. After seven or eight such crops, a rabbit or guinea pig inoculated with the artificially developed contagium, dies from the same disease as the animal from which the contagion-germ was taken. It has long been known that tuberculosis was hereditary, but it was supposed to be non-infectious. The tubercular bacillus has been discovered. Koch has cultivated it, and communicated it to animals, in whose bodies it has been found after death. (LISTERISM.] [BACTERIUM.] germ, v. i. [GERM, 8.] To sprout, to germinate, to come into existence. *ger-māin', a . [CERMANE.]