Excerpt from The Charlotte Medical Journal, Vol. 8: A Monthly Journal of Medicine and Surgery; January-June, 1896 Perhaps without knowing the why and wherefore, the priests of an cient Egypt had evidently discovered, some three or four thousand years before Christ, the secret of preventing decomposition, just as, some nine hundred years before our era, Homer knew, that obnoxious odors could be destroyed and their deleterious influence on health could be avoided by cleanliness and fumigation with burning sulphur, for in his Odyssey he makes Ulysses order the maids, thoroughly to clean the hall and fumigate it with burning sulphur, after he had slain all the suitors, whose dead bodies he had removed from the room. If we select for instance the germs, which give rise to tetanus and culture them, and then separate by a process of filtration the microbes themselves from the beeftea or the blood serum, which we employed for their culture, as the soil is used for the raising of plants from seeds, a great difference will be found between the effects of the bacteria themselves, when introduced into the animal economy, and the fluid, in Which they had multiplied. For provided this experiment is done under proper aseptic precautions, so as to insure freedom from the admixture of other germs, the injection of the micro-organisms themselves may scarcely give rise to any phenomena, but that of the fluid will develop the symptoms of poisoning, and under certain conditions, which to consider here would lead us too far astray, give rise to the disease of tetanus. 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.