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It has now been discovered that a great number of human diseases are caused by microscopic parasites, which are spoken of in a general way by the name invented by the great Pasteur, viz. "microbes." The difference of the microbes called bacteria from the disease-causing microbes classed as "Protozoa" consists in their simpler structure and mode of growth.
The good ju-juist will tell you all things act by means of their life, which means their power, their spirit. Dr. Nassau tells me the efficacy of drugs is held to depend on their benevolent spirits, which, on being put into the body, drive away the malevolent disease-causing spirits a leucocytes-versus-pathogenic-bacteria sort of influence, I suppose.
During the last twenty years the whole attitude of the study and investigation of disease-causing microbes has advanced from the preliminary step of merely identifying certain microbes as the causes of certain diseases to a further step, viz. that of attempting to defend the animal and the human body against their attacks in the manner already so finely started by Pasteur.
Our main means of defence against microbial disease, says Metchnikoff though cleanliness and precaution against access of microbes are all very well in their way is the activity of our phagocytes. Suppose there is an infection, an invasion of the blood and tissues by one or other disease-causing microbe.
And often they exist in one kind of animal without doing any harm, and are only poisonous when introduced by insects into the blood of other kinds of animals! There is, further, another set of disease-causing protozoan parasites which are similar to the amoeba or proteus-animalcule, and a third, which belong to the group of "ciliated infusoria."
There are carriers which make no selection, but are, so to speak, "casual" in their proceedings, and there are others which have the most special and elaborate relations to some one kind of disease-causing microbe for which alone they are responsible, and to the life of which they are necessary. Let us look first at the more casual group.
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