ect of destroying the poison by
oxidation.

The general treatment consists in free stimulation with whisky, brandy,
ammonia, digitalis, etc. Hypodermic injections of strychnin in doses
sufficiently large to produce a slight degree of poisoning by the drug
are particularly useful. The most rational treatment, when it is
available, is the use of the _antivenin_ introduced by Fraser and
Calmette.

CHAPTER VIII

TUBERCULOSIS

Tubercle bacillus--Methods of infection--Inherited and acquired
predisposition--Relationship of tuberculosis to injury--Human and
bovine tuberculosis--Action of the bacillus upon the
tissues--Tuberculous granulation tissue--Natural cure--Recrudescence
of the disease--THE TUBERCULOUS ABSCESS--Contents and wall of the
abscess--Tuberculous sinuses.

Tuberculosis occurs more frequently in some situations than in others;
it is common, for example, in lymph glands, in bones and joints, in the
peritoneum, the intestine, the kidney, prostate and testis, and in the
skin and subcutaneous cellular tissue; it is seldom met with in the
breast or in muscles, and it rarely affects the ovary, the pancreas, the
parotid, or the thyreoid.

_Tubercle bacilli_ vary widely in their virulence, and they are more
tenacious of life than the common pyogenic bacteria. In a dry state, for
example, they can retain their vitality for months; and they can also
survive immersion in water for prolonged periods. They resist the action
of the products of putrefaction for a considerable time, and are not
destroyed by digestive processes in the stomach and intestine. They may
be killed in a few minutes by boiling, or by exposure to steam under
pressure, or by immersion for less than a minute in 1 in 20 carbolic
lotion.

#Methods of Infection.#--In marked contrast to what obtains in the
infective diseases that have already been described, tuberculosis rarely
results from the _infection of a wound_. In exceptional instances,
however, this does occur, and in illustration of the fact may be cited
the case of a servant who cut her finger with a broken spittoon
containing the sputum of her consumptive master; the wound subsequently
showed evidence of tuberculous infection, which ultimately spread up
along the lymph vessels of the arm. Pathologists, too, whose hands,
before the days of rubber gloves, were frequently exposed to the contact
of tuberculous tissues and pus, were liable to suffer from a form of
t