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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    growing the anthrax bacillus at a high tempera- ture or in the presence of small quantities of antiseptics, that is to say, under unfavourable circumstances, whereby its virulence is dimi- nished to such an extent that a transient illness only and not death is produced on inoculation. The Pasteur system of inoculation for hydro- phobia is probably based on the same principle, and it can hardly be doubted now that vaccinia is modified variola. 2. Secondly, immunity may be induced by cautious treatment with killed cultures, or with ' bacterial toxins. The typhoid and plague vaccines are killed cultures of the respective microbes, while by treating an animal with gradually increasing doses of tetanus or diph- theria toxin, immunity to tetanus or diphtheria may be induced. 3. Thirdly, by injections of the blood-serum of an animal which has been treated by the last method, that is, with sterilised cultures or with bacterial toxins. 4. Fourthly, in rare instances by treatment with sterilised cultures or toxins of a different species ; thus sterilised cultures of the bacillus 'pyocyaneus will protect against anthrax, and of the bacillus jprodigiosus against the bacillus coli communis. Emmerich and Loew have iso-