SHORT ARTICLES.

THE EXPERIMENTAL STUDY OF GASTROTOXIC SERUM.

CHARLES BOLTON.

University College Hospital Medical School.

AN article appeared in the last number of the Journal (vol. xxvii. p. 323) by J. Koopman criticising a paper of Miyagawa upon the above subject. I n this criticism he makes two references to my own work which are inaccurate.

1. He states that Thkohari and Babes repeated my experiments, which they were unable to confirm, ‘‘ as they did not see any typical ulcer after the injection of Bolton’s gastrotoxin.” The paper of Thkohari and BabBs was published in 1903, the year before my first paper which appeared in 1904. They, moreover, worked with an entirely different serum, using the serum of the goat which had been immunised with the gastric cells of the dog, whereas my work on the properties of heterogastrotoxin was done with the serum of the rabbit immunised with the gastric cells of the guinea-pig-a very different matter (l).

2. He also states that “Bolton and Miyagawa do not only attribute local effects to their gastrotoxic serum. They found in their animals small ulcers in the bowels” and so on. My work is quite distinct from that of Miyagawa, and the chief point which I have described in the action of gastrotoxin is that it produces necrosis in no part of the body whatever except in the stomach(’), and here it is due to the gastric juice acting on a slightly damaged cell (2).

REFERENCES.

1. Proc. Roy. Soc. London, 1905, lxxiv. p. 135. 2. Proc. Roy. Soc. London (B), 1907, lxxix. p. 533.

DIFFERENTIATION OF THE STREPTOCOCCI BY CROWES MEDIUM.

H. WARREN CROWE.

Rarrogate.

THE great majority of streptococci are a t present undifferentiable -also unrecognisable, except as being members of some vague indefinite group. I t may be satisfactory to the clinician to hear that a streptococcus is a viridans, but the bacteriologist cannot honestly think that he has by this label advanced the knowledge of the case one iota. Pneumococci produce a green discoloration of blood agar, so do some of the fsecal group and many of the S. saliwarius, S. mitis and X. equinus groups. Apart from the hlemolytic streptococci and pneumococci, the 8. fecalis (enterococcus) group is the only one which can lay

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