Studies on immunisation and their application to the diagnosis and treatment of bacterial infections / [Wright].

  • Almroth Wright
Date:
1909
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: Studies on immunisation and their application to the diagnosis and treatment of bacterial infections / [Wright]. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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

    13/518
    PREFACE I HAVE brought together in this volume the series of studies on the protective elements of the blood, on vaccine-therapy, and on therapeu- tic immunisation taken generally which I have published during the past dozen years. The three final papers have been revised. The rest are reprinted here without change, except only in the respect that the detailed de- scription of the technique, which I am reserving for separate treatment, has been omitted. In Part I, I have placed those papers which deal primarily with the protective elements of the blood, and less directly with the problem of immunisation. These are arranged in three sub-sections entitled respectively agglutinins, bactericidins, and opsonins. In Part II will be found, arranged in the order of pubhcation, the papers which deal with the real subject-matter of the book, i.e. with the problem of fighting bacterial infection by those defensive agencies which the organism itself employs when it contends with micsobic invasion. The papers in this section of the book fall naturally under three periods. In the papers of the first period the conception of vaccine-therapy originates and takes shape. Just as the antirabies inoculations of Pasteur—inoculations which are undertaken after the implantation of the rabies virus into the body —are affihated to his earher prophylactic inoculations, so also here phy- lactic inoculation, if I may term it so, came to birth from prophylactic inoculation. When once it had become clear in the course of an investigation into the effect of anti-typhoid inoculation upon the blood, that it would be practicable to control the negative phase and to confer upon a patient the advantages of immunisation without risk or appreciable delay, the thought lay very near that it might prove possible to elicit, even after microbes had made good their entry into the body, an im- munising response which would be therapeutically valuable. In the papers of the second period further points emerge. These emerge in connexion with research undertaken to account for the failure of vaccine-therapy in individual instances, and to account for the irregularities of the opsonic readings obtained in certain types of infections. It is brought out in these papers that the antibacterial agencies, even
    digitised image 1
    digitised image 2
    digitised image 3