Abstract
About fifty years ago Weil 1 discovered an acute infectious disease with jaundice and fever to which his name was later applied. In 1914 Inada and Ido 2 proved the etiologic agent to be a spiral shaped micro-organism which Noguchi 3 shortly thereafter described in detail, naming it Leptospira icterohaemorrhagiae. Since the identification of this micro-organism there has gradually accumulated knowledge of other morphologically similar but serologically and immunologically different members of the same group of leptospiras. 4 They are distributed worldwide and are usually associted with rats and dogs. Many of them classed as Leptospira biflexa 5 are not pathogenic for man. In Europe at least three distinct pathogenic varieties are recognized: ( 1) Leptospira icterohaemorrhagiae of Weil's disease, (2) Leptospira canicola 6 of an infection in dogs transmissible to man and (3) Leptospira grippo-typhosa 7 of a syndrome known in different places as summer influenza, harvest fever, mud fever,
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