1320

Bennett and Dr. D. T. Davies he had found that a z’

rise in the white count ranging from 15 to 30thousand was almost invariable, and did not indicatethe onset of toxic manifestations. As regards thefuture of these patients, unfortunately the reductionin the red cell count was never more than temporary,although small doses of the drug given occasionallywould keep the polycythaemia withinreasonable bounds.’Whether such treatment continued over a period ofyears will produce permanent damage to the liver is

- a question which present experience cannot answer.

THE M.R.C. AND GOOD ENGLISH.

THE lot of the writer of monographs is a hard one,,for he must have done some hard thinking, and it isnot made easier by the Medical Research Councilwhich, in our view, imposes upon him salutary rulesjnspired by wisdom and experience. He is advisednot to commence an article, he must begin it. He.cannot have been engaged in a study of his subject ;he has just studied it. He should not write in con-junction with a friend ; but just with him. And heshould not collect a considerable amount of materialour a considerable number of facts, he should onlycollect much or many of them. In short, restrictions.,of liberty have been suggested, so that his manu-script will undergo a 20 per cent. reduction (or, asone might say, be one-fifth shorter) and eventuallyhe may find himself writing quite good English withoutthe help of the Publications Department of theCouncil. In the Notes upon the Preparation ofReports for Publication, which have just been issuedin a revised edition after an interval of nearly nine.years, the advice remains substantially the sameexcept for the addition of two useful appendices :one of shorter and better equivalents for long words orphrases, the other a list of abbreviations of the namesof journals taken from the World List of Scientific I,Periodicals prepared under the direction of theKeeper of the Department of Printed Books in theBritish Museum. The Notes have not been placed- upon sale, but have been widely distributed among Iresearch workers in medicine. The advice is notoppressive or cramping to an author’s style ; by.surrendering his liberty in non-essentials he will gain- the freedom in essentials which really matters.’The Notes are free from the touch of irony or subtlemalice which seems almost incumbent on those who,desire to impose their own literary style on others.It was a wise author who admitted the many ways,of writing tribal lays every single one of which wasright. The Council’s censor has refrained from suchbanal quips as advising a would-be author to add abibliography to his paper rather than a list of referencesand never to write the patient died but to say he ceasedor

" exitus lethalis." He might have said : If you feelthe urge to write a medical article do not restrainyourself merely because you have nothing new tosay and hardly know how to say it; facts and theoriesin medicine must be repeated again and again todrive them home. It is this sort of advice thatestranges the earnest young writer and puts him offhis stride when a more sympathetic mentor wouldbe helpful in setting his feet on the narrow path ofsuccessful authorship.

Comparison of the Notes of 1929 with those of1921 reveals one alteration for which we are pro-foundly grateful. In counselling the avoidance ofobscure and misleading abbreviations the Publica-tions Department has now fallen in with the continentalpractice of using the single letter g as an abbreviationfor the gramme when standing alone or in its variouscompounds (kg., cg., mg.). Owing to the unfortunatesimilarity of the abbreviations used for the words: gramme and grain these words should always bespelt in full if there is any possibility of doubt as towhich unit is specified, but the Council has seen thewisdom of adopting the symbol g. for the grammewhich is slowly but surely taking its place as the unitof weight throughout the civilised world. Rather

singularly in doing so the Council has gone back onits abbreviation for cubic centimetre, which in 1921was given as c.cm. and is now c.c., an exception tothe rule made, it is stated, in order to conform withthe general practice. But here, again, we feel that tomake the exception is to introduce disorder into thevery heart of exactitude. No doubt to those who arebrought up in chemical laboratories a hundred-see-see measure or a ten-see-see bottle has become a

habit of mind ; to the chemist the see-see is the onlyunit, and the exception scarcely matters, but thebiochemist has to do as much or more with thecubic millimetre, with its orthodox abbreviation.There can surely be no hardship or .ambiguity inwriting c.cm. and we trust that in this particularwriters of monographs will assert their individualjudgment against that of the Medical ResearchCouncil.

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PSITTACOSIS.

IT is only recently that any real headway has beenmade in the investigation of the complex salmonellagroup of bacteria. It is now recognised that mankindshares infection by this group with a great variety ofanimals, and that the normal source of infection isthe animal. A prominent member of the group, anda very widespread one, is Bacillus certrycke, which isoften described under one of its very numeroussynonyms. Among the rarer manifestations, at anyrate in man, is the infection of parrots known aspsittacosis, which seems to be transmitted from sickbirds to man, and is held responsible for the recentdeath of Dr. D. L. Thomas, M.O.H. for Stepney.

In the latter part of the last century much attentionwas paid to the condition, especially in Paris and inRome; a correspondent of THE LANCET in 1899wrote with disgust of the hundreds of deaths fromthis disease in imported parrots, and in 1897 wepublished accounts of a number of fatal humaninfections in Italy. In Paris, in 1892, a real epidemicwas recorded, with a case mortality of 45 per cent.Nocard, in 1893, recovered an organism from the bone-marrow of an infected bird, and Gilbert and Fournier,in 1896, from a human case, which has since beenknown as B. psittacosis, until it was recognised asthe familiar B. certrycke. So recently as July 20th ofthis year Dr. A. P. Thomson reported in our columnsa case in which the patient appeared to suffer fromatypical fever, with a positive agglutination toB. paratyphosus B. She had nursed a sick parrot, andher little niece solved the problem of her illness bysuggesting that " auntie has what the parrot had."From a developing parotitis (suitably enough) anorganism was recovered which was stated to agglu-tinate slightly with paratyphoid B serum. Agglu-tination, however, does not seem to have been testedwith certrycke serum, and the organism was at firstdescribed as Gram-positive. Three other less well-authenticated cases were recorded in the same

district.Many authorities deny that an infection is trans-

mitted by parrots. To-day, at any rate, psittacosisis exceedingly rare in man, and, indeed, very uncom-mon in birds. At the London Zoo it is unknown,and it is possible that the disgraceful methods oftransportation which our correspondent discussed in1899 have to-day been abandoned, to the advantageof man and of parrot. The condition is so seldom metwith that the diagnosis is scarcely one that shouldspring to the lips with confidence. The essentialsin making out such diagnosis are a fulminatinginfection, with a positive agglutination to thesalmonella group of organisms, the recovery of anorganism of that group, and its identification withB. aertrycke. If combined with the recovery of anidentical organism from the incriminated bird sucha history would be convincing. It is hardly necessaryto add that the risk of contracting the infection fromdomestic parrots is remote, though it is probablywise to beware of such birds as develop an illnesssoon after importation into this country.