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The Bacillus of Syphilis. – Dr. Lustgarten, a young Viennese physician,
who spent some months in Prof. Weigert’s laboratory in Leipzig, and to
whom a place as assistant in Prof. Kaposi’s Clinic for skin diseases in the
Vienna Hospital is reserved, will communicate to the Vienna Society of Physicians,
at its next meeting, the results of his investigations in Leipzig. As
those results will certainly attract much attention and interest wherever they
become known, it is a happy accident that private communication makes it
possible to lay in advance before the readers of The Medical News a short
abstract of Dr. Lustgarten’s discovery.

It must be said, however, that Dr. Lustgarten is not to be considered as one
of Prof. Weigert’s pupils, but that he is only indebted to him for the facilities
of his laboratory.

Dr. Lustgarten has found a new bacillus which he considers as characteristic
of syphilis, since this bacillus has been found nowhere else but in
syphilitic tissues, namely, in a gumma and in several cases of scleroma syphiliticum.
The tumors showed, on thin sections, when treated in a specific way
with certain coloring matters, bacilli, which, though in shape and size resembling
tubercle-bacilli, could easily be diagnosticated as quite different from
them by the reaction toward various staining fluids. Dr. Koch recognized
the dif-

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ference between both kinds of bacilli and the morphological
individuality of the bacillus found by Lustgarten. There is one more distinguishing
characteristic of the bacillus of syphilis, and that is that it never is
found outside of cells, but always in their body.

The results of further experiments on the cultivation of the new bacillus,
and on infection of animals by subsequent cultures of it, and further microscopical
investigation, are to be expected before the last word on the new
bacillus can be said.