Excerpt from The Practitioner For the purposes of this article, however, we shall regard all those cases which bore no bacteriological diagnosis as dysentery, in view of the fact that this hospital was one of those selected for the reception of dysentery patients. With few exceptions, all the series of 463 patients had passed the acute stage, many, indeed, having been sent here as cases of post-dysenteric d'ebility. The average length of time elapsing between the onset of illness and the date of the first examination made in Reading was 484 days. This average is based on the available records of 274 cases. Hence, for the most part, the work resolved itself into a search for carriers either of pathogenic bacteria or of the encysted form of entamoeba histolytica. For bacteriological diagnosis, the centrifugalized deposit from the urine was smeared over two successive plates of Macconkey's medium, while in the case of the faeces a sample was suspended in sterile normal saline and a portion of this plated out as in the case with the urines. Suspicious colonies were subcultured, and subsequently examined as to their motility and their reaction in certain sugars. Those which passed such tests were subjected to agglutination by a modified Dreyer's method, already referred to by two of us in a previous communication,1 using the Oxford standard agglutinating sera. Those organisms which failed to become agglutinated by any of the sera were rejected. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.