Serum therapy : bacterial therapeutics and vaccines / by R. T. Hewlett.

Date:
1903
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: Serum therapy : bacterial therapeutics and vaccines / by R. T. Hewlett. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh. The original may be consulted at the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh.

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    return to the Pasteurian method, as witness the cholera and plague vaccines of Haffkine and the typhoid vaccine of Wright. It must be clearly understood that the Pasteurian method does not cure the disease when this has declared itself; it is only a preventive of an attack. A new departure was made when Salmon and Smith in America found that the chemical pro- ducts of the liog-cholera bacillus, freed from the micro-organisms themselves by filtration through porous porcelain, would produce immunity and protect an animal against injections of the living microbe. This fact, as is well known, was ex- tended to diphtheria and tetanus through the researches of Roux, Vaillard, Behring, and others ; but it was reserved for Behring to show that the immunity produced by the injection of bacterial toxins could be transmitted to a second animal by injections of the blood-serum of the first or treated one, and that this blood-serum, termed anti-toxin, could also be used as a cura- tive agent. Although the practical application of anti-toxin treatment is so largely due to Behring and Roux, no man has done more, for the study and theory of immunity than Ehrlich, whose marvellous inductions, confirmed as they have been by most beautiful and masterly experimental methods, must place him in