Excerpt from Interstate Medical Journal, Vol. 7: A Monthly Magazine of Medicine and Surgery; January, 1900 Writing under the above caption, we can emphatically answer the query, Is bile an antiseptic fluid? By saying that it is flat. There is a wide-spread erroneous-impression among many members of the profession, engendered, it is true, by false teachings of the older physiologists, that bile possesses marked antiseptic properties amounting to those possessed by the chemicals of inorganic and organic nature used by the quarantine authorities in their technical work. This erroneous impression can be refuted by the simple observations of men who have time and again dem onstrated different pathogenic and non-pathogenic bacteria in the gall-bladder in both the living and the dead subject. Consider for a moment the frequency of the findings, in the case of gall-stones and cholecystitis, of. Both the colon and the typhoid bacilli, and then imagine, if you can, such a thing as an antiseptic bile! It is now accepted as a fact that the typhoid bacillus very frequently invades the gall-bladder and liver after an attack of typhoid fever. If the bile possessed properties of any antiseptic power at all, then surely would the growth of such a weak micro-organism as the typhoid bacillus be inhibited and the life of the germ ultimately destroyed. From these findings it is but fair to assume that the bile in man is not an antiseptic fluid. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.