On the Recognition and Therapy of Simian Woolsorter's Disease.

In the Brown Lectures of 1880 and 1881 Prof. W. S. Greenfield (1880, 1881), reported the anthrax bacillus to be the aetiological agent of woolsorter's disease and presented what remains today the classical description of the clinical manifestations and morbid anatomy of respiratory anthrax in man. Though at present infrequent, woolsorter's disease still, in the era of antibiotics, is associated with a high mortality rate. Experimental evaluation of therapeutic approaches to woolsorter's disease, as distinguished from cutaneous anthrax, has been limited since the mediastinal cellulitis and intrathoracic lymphadenitis characteristic of the human disease have not been observed in experimental respiratory anthrax of lower animals. For example, guinea-pigs, sheep and rhesus monkeys develop a septicaemia, and such lesions as are found at post-mortem examination are secondary to this septicaemia. Recent observations (Gochenour, Gleiser & Tigertt, 1962) of the clinical course and morbid anatomy in rhesus monkeys receiving early, inadequate penicillin prophylaxis following inhalation of spores of Bacillus anthracis indicated that some animals so modified had a febrile course and exhibited