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I make the following claims: that the antitoxin, being itself a most powerful poison, may be and often is the direct cause of paralysis, or of death due to heart-failure. That diphtheria treated with antitoxin may be and often is followed by paralysis, heart-failure, or lifelong invalidism of some kind after the patient has apparently recovered from the disease.
Of the two, the horse was found to give both the stronger antitoxin and the larger amounts of it, so that he is now exclusively used for its production. Who could tell whether the "heal-serum," as the Germans call it, would act in a human being as it had upon all the other animals? In agonies of suspense, vibrating between hope and dread, doctors and parents hung over the couch.
To prove my claims, I submit the following facts: I have in my possession clippings from newspapers from different parts of the country stating that death had followed the administration of the diphtheria antitoxin for prevention or "immunization," that is, where the individual had been in good health at the time the antitoxin was given.
The physician's prayer is the diphtheria antitoxin, which in his hands is the life-saving device. When the physician administers quinine for malaria, or salvarsan for syphilis, he effects cures for these diseases by using agents to which the clergy strenuously objected when they were first introduced.
The House Surgeon wrinkled his forehead in his most professional manner. "Precautionary disinfecting?" Margaret MacLean laughed again. "That's an awfully good guess, but it's wrong. I've been administering antitoxin for trusteria."
Plenty of lewd literature in the circulars of the quacks and even in the sensational newspapers will reach their eye and their brain, and yet it will leave not the slightest trace. The trained, clean mind develops a moral antitoxin which at every pulse-beat of life destroys the poisonous toxins produced by the germs which enter the system.
The antitoxin method of treating diphtheria has robbed this disease of much of its terror, yet it not infrequently happens that the physician is called too late to administer this remedy to the best advantage. Since certain cases of diphtheria are likely to be mistaken for croup, the parent frequently does not realize the serious condition of the child.
About twenty years ago, two great scientists, one a Frenchman named Roux a student of the great Professor Louis Pasteur, of whom I am sure you have heard and the other, a German, named Behring, discovered an antitoxin for diphtheria; that is, something to defeat the poison of the diphtheria germ. When this antitoxin is injected into the blood, it will cure diphtheria.
With this remedy, our entire feeling toward diphtheria is changed. Instead of dreading it above all things, we know now, from hundreds of thousands of cures, that, if a case is seen on the first day of the disease, and this antitoxin injected with a hypodermic needle, it is almost certain that the patient will recover; not more than two or three cases out of a hundred will fail.
The Health Bulletins sent regularly to every physician in the City of Chicago by the City Health Department show an average of from fifteen to twenty deaths every week from diphtheria treated with antitoxin. I do not deny that the antitoxin treatment may have reduced somewhat the mortality percentage of this disease, allowing even for the great uncertainty of medical statistics.
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