On pharmaco-therapy and preventive inoculation applied to pneumonia in the African native : with a discourse on the logical methods which ought to be employed in the evaluation of therapeutic agents / by Sir Almroth E. Wright.

  • Wright, Almroth E. (Almroth Edward), Sir, 1861-1947.
Date:
1914
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Licence: In copyright

Credit: On pharmaco-therapy and preventive inoculation applied to pneumonia in the African native : with a discourse on the logical methods which ought to be employed in the evaluation of therapeutic agents / by Sir Almroth E. Wright. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by The University of Leeds Library. The original may be consulted at The University of Leeds Library.

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    chemical agents which are monotropic, or as nearly as possible monotropic, for the protoplasm of the pneumo- coccus, which is, in the Transvaal, as elsewhere, the causal agent of the disease. The outlook is as follows : In the first place the animal organism—and the human organism, it would appear, in a paramount degree—is capable of elaborating chemical agents such as we required. There is within the human body a laboratory which can, within certain limits, furnish bacteriotropic substances which will enter into destructive chemical combination with any and every variety of bacterial protoplasm. And the bacteriotropic substances of its furnishing are such as do not become inert in the blood, and such as do not poison the tissues. Upon these facts, and upon the fact that the chemical machinery which elaborates bacteriotropic substances is set in motion whenever a chemical attack is made upon the tissues by dissolved bacterial protoplasm, all immuno-therapy, and in particular all vaccine therapy, has been built up. But we can conceive also of other chemical agency for killing microbes in the body. It is conceivable that drugs might be found which should fulfil the required condition of being monotropic for a particular variety of bacterial protoplasm, or for bacterial protoplasm in general. As already indicated, it is with the therapeutic method which proposes to employ such drugs—the specific chemo- therapy of Ehrlich—that we are here concerned. In connexion with this we have here to ask ourselves :— (a) Whether toe do well to employ the term chemo- therapy to denote the treatment of microbial diseases by drugs which are monotropic for the offending microbes ; (b) What is the relation in which this method stands to traditionary medicine ; And (c) whether it is a defensible proceeding to administer a drug ichere we have neither a priori grounds for believing that that drug could, or satisfactory evidence to show that it does, effect tohat it is intended to effect.