Immunity to infective diseases : a pathological study in view of recent researches / by Joseph Coats.

  • Coats, Joseph, 1846-1899.
Date:
1895
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Immunity to infective diseases : a pathological study in view of recent researches / by Joseph Coats. 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.

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    [FROM THE PROCEEDINGS OF THE PHILOSOPHICAL SOCIETY OF GLASGOW.] Immunity to Infective Diseases: A Pathological Study in view of Recent Researches. By Joseph Coats, M.D., Professor of Pathology in the University of Glasgow. [Read before the Society, 20th November, 1895.] I do not know that any explanation or apology is needed for addressing this Society on a pathological subject. It is unusual, but I may presume that, as a society, we claim to include all kinds of wisdom, and that there is nothing which has truth and fact in it that lies outside our scope. I thought also that it might not be unwelcome to some to get a glimpse into a field with which they are perhaps unfamiliar. The subject which I have chosen—that of Immunity—has its important practical aspects, which have already been ably dealt with in this hall. I may at once warn you that the pathologist's point of view is that of observation and scientific inference, and not directly the practical one, although our subject itself is an illustration of how the practical often closely follows the scientific. To my own mind the subject is one of extreme interest as a mere matter of pathological study, and it is purely from this point of view that I have chosen it for to-night's discourse, in the hope that I may be able to impart to my audience some of *the interest which I myself feel. Immunity and susceptibility to disease may be regarded as the converse of each other. Immunity is non-susceptibility, and sus- ceptibility is non-immunity. When we speak of any specific disease in relation to mankind, we imply a certain susceptibility on the part of human beings to that disease; but when we come to regard individual men, we discover an extraordinary difference in the degrees of susceptibility, and, conversely, in the degrees of immunity. These variations are most readily demonstrable and most easily studied in diseases whose causes are somewhat fully known, and such are some of these that belong to the group of Infective Diseases.