Certain practical aspects of immunity / by R.A. O'Brien.

  • O'Brien, Richard Alfred, 1878-1970.
Date:
[1927?]
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: Certain practical aspects of immunity / by R.A. O'Brien. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    1/8
    Reprinted from the BRITISH MEDICAL JOURNAL, November 26th, 1927. CERTAIN PRACTICAL ASPECTS OF IMMUNITY.* BY R. A. O’BRIEN, M.D., Wellcome Physiological Research Laboratories, Beckenham, Kent. In reviewing tlie great amount of work being carried out in immunology and its vast literature, tlie general practi¬ tioner, medical or veterinary, has a right from time to time to ask of the workers in these fields what advances in medicine have resulted—advances so generally accepted as to be reasonably considered permanent, and which he must therefore be prepared to use in his practice. It was arranged that, as Professor Browning is dealing with the more attractive explanation of the phenomena underlying certain aspects of immunity, I should deal with what we may call the practical achievements of immunology in the recent past, and also survey briefly the tasks just ahead; since comparative medicine is represented at this Section, a review of these achievements in human and veterinary medicine side by side may net be out of place. In endeavouring to estimate future tasks and possible lines of advance, what lessons can we learn from the imme¬ diate past? During the oast century the death rate from many human diseases has been much reduced. Those that spring at once to the mind in this connexion are the intes¬ tinal diseases—typhoid, cholera, and dysentery, and typhus and plague. I do not know that we can draw from veterinary epidemiology a close parallel. If we endeavour to draw up an order of merit for those who have achieved this reduction, we shall have to - award the greater honour to the hygienist and sanitarian, who insists on general measures of common-sense cleanliness, fresh air, a decent allowance of space for the individual— that is, the avoidance of overcrowding—and the guarding of food and water supplies. Next in order would come the immunologist, who presents himself mostly with a syringe and needle. Last of all the clinician, when disease surmounts the barriers set up by the hygienist and vaccinator, to-day treats his patients with more knowledge than of old, and reduces the death rate either with “ specific ” remedies, such as antitoxin, as in diphtheria, or with greater clinical skill, until he to-day expects a mortality not more than half that of an earlier date. * A paper read in a discussion on immunity at a joint meeting1 of the Sections of Pathology and Bacteriology and of Comparative Medicine at the Annual Meeting of the British Medical Association, Edinburgh, July, 1927. Professor T. J. Mackie was in the chair. [329/27]