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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    disease should be freshly made, since it has been shown that the value of such serums rapidly falls. Two special factors enter into the question of the manufacture of antibacterial serums which do not apply to antitoxic preparations. In the first place it is found that some species of bacteria comprise different strains or varieties, which react differently towards protective serums. Thus, a serum may be prepared which will be fatal to a certain strain of streptococci—the variety used for its preparation —but which will have no similar effect on another race of the same organisms, derived perhaps from a different patient or from a slightly different form of pyogenic disease. Now, in any individual case of illness we cannot tell what strain of bacteria may be present, and therefore in preparing a serum for practical therapeutics it is advisable to use several strains for the purpose of immunising the animal, in order that the chances of combating the causal organism in any human patient may be increased. A serum thus prepared with several strains of an organism is said to be polyvalent. Again, as has already been pointed out, it does not follow that the complement existing in the body of one animal will be capable of uniting with the copula supplied by another animal, so as to destroy a given bacterium. An antibacterial serum originally, no doubt, possesses in itself both complement and intermediary body. But the former is an unstable substance : it rapidly vanishes from the serum when it is kept,1 and it is not improbable that it is destroyed when the serum is injected into another kind of animal. Hence the copula contained in the immune serum may have to depend on a complement found in the animal or man' to which it is administered, in order to have a bactericidal effect. If the two bodies do not fit one another, no curative result will ensue. It has been recommended, therefore, that serums for human use should be prepared from some 1 See Ainley Walker, Lancet, 1901, i. 18.