Investigation of the sugar-forming ferments.

Cohnheim developed the doctrine of infarction as a result of occlusion of terminal arteries. He explained the haemorrhagic nature of certain infarcts on the basis of a reflux flow and diapedesis through the altered capillaries of the infarcted area.

Cohnheim was the master experimental pathologist of the 19th century. He was a pupil of Virchow and Kölliker; in contradiction of the former, he showed the essential feature of inflammation to be the passage of leucocytes through the capillary walls and their accumulation at the site of the injury – “ohne Gefässe keine Entzündung”. His first article on the subject will be found in Virchows Arch. path. Anat., 1867, 40, 1-79.

Cohnheim gave a more convincing account than Pepper of the bone-marrow changes in pernicious anemia.

Apart from Virchow’s Cellularpathologie, this was the most influential textbook of pathology during the 19th century. It includes (vol. 1, p. 38) a report on the experimental production of heart murmurs. English translation, New Sydenham Society, 3 vols., 1889-90.

Cohnheim, a pioneer pathologist, was Virchow’s most distinguished pupil. Among his many valuable experiments, the greatest was perhaps his successful inoculation of tuberculosis in the anterior chamber of the rabbit’s eye, 1877, an account of which is included in the above work. This proved that tuberculous material derived from different sources owed its infectiveness to the same contagious factor. The book first appeared in quarto, 29 pp., 1879, with a Latin imprint: Lipsiae, typis A. Edelmanni. This scarce version was followed by the more common octavo (44 pp.) recorded above. An English translation is included in D. U. Cullimore’s Consumption as a contagious disease, London, [1880].