The Clinical Aspects of Botulism

Abstract

Botulism may have been known to antiquity. K. F. Meyer (1928) suggests that Emperor Leo VI of Byzantium (886–911 A.D.) earned the sobriquet, “The Wise,” or “The Philosopher,” possibly because of an edict that forbade the eating of blood sausage due to its harmfulness to health. Nine centuries later physicians of southern Germany recognized the disease as the often fatal syndrome that sometimes followed the consumption of a regionally popular blood sausage. As a consequence the manufacture of that dangerous food product came under strict government surveillance, and the term botulism (botulus is Latin for sausage) was applied to the illness. In 1895 an outbreak of a strange neuroparalytic disorder occurred among 34 members of a musical society who, after performing at a funeral in the Belgium village of Ellezelles, had eaten some raw, salted ham. Three of the musicians died, while 10 became critically ill. The Belgian bacteriologist van Ermengem investigated the outbreak and, in a paper that remains a classic in the annals of bacteriology, showed that a spore-forming anaerobic bacillus produced a toxin responsible for the disease in the sick musicians and caused the illness previously termed botulism (van Ermengem, 1897).