THE DIAGNOSIS OF TYPHOID FEVER BY CULTURES FROM THE BLOOD OF THE EAR.

Although the diagnosis of typhoid fever by the cultivation of Eberth's bacillus from the patient's blood has now been practiced for some years, the methods hitherto generally employed have involved such complicated technic that they have been used to a very limited extent outside of hospitals. The cultural method of diagnosis, however, possesses two distinct advantages. In the first place, the blood culture is the method by which the earliest diagnosis can be made, inasmuch as the organisms appear to be present in the blood from the very beginning of the constitutional symptoms, thus usually a considerable time before the agglutination reaction is positive. Secondly, the blood culture is the most scientifically accurate method of diagnosis. At the Massachusetts General Hospital an agglutination reaction is considered to be positive if there is complete clumping and loss of motility of the organisms in a dilution of 1 to 50 in one