A STUDY OF THE RELATIONSHIP OF THE SCROTAL SWELLING AND RICKETTSIA BODIES TO MEXICAN TYPHUS FEVER

Abstract

THE EXPERIMENTS RECORDED ABOVE HAVE DEMONSTRATED THE FOLLOWING POINTS: 1. Scrotal swelling can appear in guinea pigs directly inoculated from a human case of Mexican typhus fever. 2. In certain strains of this disease, a number of generations of guinea pigs may show absolutely no scrotal swelling, which, however, may reappear in subsequent animals, suggesting-though not absolutely proving-that the scrotal swelling is an integral part of the disease and is not due to an incidental accompanying organism. If the latter were true, one would expect the organisms that caused the scrotal swelling to disappear during the negative generations. 3. A typhus fever sustained by a guinea pig without scrotal swelling protects against the swelling upon subsequent inoculation with a strain which produces this with considerable regularity. 4. Louse passage increases the capacity of a strain to produce the scrotal lesion, probably because of the considerable accumulation of rickettsia in the louse, but in the experiment noted, even after louse passage, two generations without swelling occurred, followed by reoccurrence of the swelling. We believe that these observations, taken together, can be interpreted in favour of the likelihood that the swelling is a part of the disease and that the rickettsia-like organisms described by Mooser in the tunica vaginalis have etiological significance.