The plague of Marseilles and the experiments of Professor Anton Deidier on its transmission.

THE story of the Plague of Marseilles in I720-I has been vividly described by Gaffarel and Duranty2 and the part played by the administration, the faculty of medicine, the Church, the port officials and other public bodies has been carefully and sympathetically assessed. There are, however, many aspects of this epidemic which deserve further consideration. One is the research of Professor Anton Deidier into the cause of plague. Although his reasons for performing the experiments which will be described later seem strange to us, and although some of the conclusions he drew were inaccurate, the experiments he made are worth recalling. He transmitted plague by injecting bile from plague corpses into dogs; he showed that the bile of dogs dying of plague produced plague in other dogs, and he showed that the bile of persons dying of other fevers did not produce plague. We now know that the bile in plague contains Pasteurella pestis.3 Most of the physicians of Marseilles, who attended the first victims of the epidemic, were of the opinion that the disease was plague and that it was contagious: