Serums, vaccines and toxines in treatment and diagnosis / by Wm. Cecil Bosanquet ... and John W.H. Eyre.

  • Bosanquet, W. Cecil (William Cecil), 1866-1941.
Date:
1910
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Serums, vaccines and toxines in treatment and diagnosis / by Wm. Cecil Bosanquet ... and John W.H. Eyre. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by the Harvey Cushing/John Hay Whitney Medical Library at Yale University, through the Medical Heritage Library. The original may be consulted at the Harvey Cushing/John Hay Whitney Medical Library at Yale University.

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    depends are called agglutinins. The discovery of this phenomenon is due to Gruber and Durham, and experi- ments were made with regard to its clinical possibilities by Griinbaum ; but Widal first published his results, showing the possible use of the phenomenon as a test for the exist- ence of enteric fever, and the reaction is generally associated with his name. Not only are typhoid bacilli agglutinated by their appropriate serum, but the same phenomenon A Fig. 4.—Diagrammatic representation of agglutination. A, Free bacilli; B, Bacilli agglutinated. occurs with other organisms, such as the Micrococcus melitensis of Malta fever, the bacillus of dysentery (Shiga), streptococci, tubercle bacilli, &c. It was at first thought that the property of agglutinat- ing bacteria was specific, i.e. that a serum would only clump the particular kind of organism which had been injected into the animal, or which had caused disease in the patient. This appears to be only generally true. On the one hand, it is found that a certain degree of agglutinative power towards many different kinds of bacteria may exist in normal blood, so that inoculation or disease only increases an already-existing property; on the other hand, it appears that in some cases, at all events, treatment with a particular organism may increase the agglutinative power as atfecting other varieties of germs. Thus, in a case quoted by Posselt