1868 contains an elaborate report on the "Texas Cattle Disease," then prevailing to an alarming extent in New York, to which he contributed the results of his careful microscopic examinations. In the course of them he discovered in the bile of the infected animals a vegetable parasite which became further developed there, and which was in his opinion the cause of the disease. His enthusiasm over what promised, in its wide suggestions, to be a discovery of great value to medical science will be remembered by all his friends. He says, "The fungus origin of zymotic disease is now conceded by the highest authorities in mycological research, and the Texas fever is one which points with unusual clearness to this mode of propagation." His conclusions were confirmed by Prof. Hallier. of Jena, to whom Dr. Harris sent specimens of the infected bile He pronounced the parasite a new discovery, and named it in honor of the discoverer, Coniothecium Stilesianum.
Dr. Stiles never was idle, and his labors continued long past the hours that belong to sleep. This was his ruin. Early and late he labored at his engrossing science, until his mental powers began to give indications of disorder, and in the summer of 1870 a grave form of insanity was developed, from which he never recovered. His general health, however, was good, and he attended more or less to practice at different times. In 1872 he traveled again in Europe. During the latter part of winter and early spring his mental disease grew more serious; and early in April, 1873, he went home to his mother's house in West Chester, Pennsylvania. There he was attacked with pneumonia of a grave form, and died after ten days' illness.
Stillé, Alfred (1813–1900)
Born October 30, 1813, the son of John and Maria Wagner Stillé, early Swedish immigrants, Dr. Stillé began his lifework with the generation which saw the new pathology and the new clinical methods. After joining in the "conic section" rebellion at Yale, which led to the retirement of one-half of the class, he seems to have had for a time a leaning toward the law. "During the years of probation," he says, "I tested the strength of my partiality for a medical career by some medical reading, including Bell's "Anatomy" and Bichat's "General Anatomy." and attending the anatomical instruction at the Jefferson Medical College, He took an A. B. at Yale in 1832 and at the University of Pennsylvania the same year, and the latter institution gave him an A. M. in 1835, M. D. in 1836 and LL.D. in 1889.
The best of luck awaited him when, in 1835–36, he became house physician at "Blockley," under W. W. Gerhard (q. v.), a clinical teacher of the very first rank, and fresh from the wards of the great French physician, Louis.
While still a medical student two of his fellow-townsmen returned from abroad glowing with the fire they had caught in Paris, the then acknowledged center of medical science. Gerhard and Pennock (q. v.) were the apostles of the school of observation under whose preaching he became a zealous convert and, as soon as it was possible, hastened to the enchanted scene of their European labors.
Method and accuracy were from the first characteristic of Dr. Stillé's work. He played an interesting part in that splendid contribution of American medicine to the differentiation of typhus and typhoid fever. I will let him tell the story in his own words. In a manuscript he says: "The year 1836 is memorable for an epidemic of typhus (t. petechialis) which prevailed in the district of the city which is the usual seat of epidemics caused or aggravated by crowding, viz., south of Spruce and between Fourth and Tenth Streets. A great many of the poor creatures living in that overcrowded region, who were attacked with typhus, were brought to the Philadelphia Hospital, where I had charge of one of the wards assigned to them. I had the great good fortune to study these cases under Dr. Gerhard. His permanent reputation rests upon the papers published by him in Hays' Journal, in which he fully established the essential differences between this disease and typhoid fever. Every step of my study of typhus in the wards and post-mortem revealed new contrasts between the two diseases, so that I felt surprised that the British physicians should have continued to confound them. I was very diligent in making clinical notes and dissections, spending many hours every day in the presence of the disease." In an unpublished memoir of Dr. Stillé read before the Medical Society of Observation (September 14 and 28, 1838), the two diseases are compared, symptom by symptom and lesion by lesion; and, apart from the phenomena of fever common to all febrile affections, the opposite of what is observed in the one is sure to be presented in the other. (Valleix, "Arch. gen.," February, 1839, p. 213.)
