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This does not cure the disease nor in itself drive off the bacilli, but it does protect the body from the poisons to such an extent as to enable it more readily to assert its own resisting powers. This method of using antitoxines as a help in curing disease is very recent, and we can not even guess what may come of it. It has apparently been successfully applied in diphtheria.
Such an antidote to the bacterial poison would not, indeed, produce a cure, but it would perhaps have the effect of annulling the action of the poisons, and would thus give the body a much greater chance to master the bacteria. It is upon this principle that is based the use of antitoxines in diphtheria and tetanus
The further combat is between the poisonous products, termed toxines, engendered by the bacteria and certain antidotal substances, called antitoxines, newly created in the watery portion of the blood by some wonderful provision of Nature that is not yet well understood.
Each infective disease has its special toxine, and for the destruction of each the blood prepares its particular antitoxine; possibly, however, some of the antitoxines may be efficacious against more than one kind of toxine, for there are physicians who are convinced that vaccination is a temporary preventive of whooping-cough.
Above all, we must remember that the antitoxines do not cure in themselves; they only guard the body from the weakening effects of the poisons until it can cure itself, and, unless the body has resisting powers, the antitoxine will fail to produce the desired results. One further point in the action of the antitoxines must be noticed.
It will be clear that to obtain the antitoxine we must depend upon some natural method for its production. We do not know enough of the chemical nature of the antitoxines to manufacture them artificially. Of course we can not deny the possibility of their artificial production, and certain very recent experiments indicate that perhaps they may be made by the agency of electricity.
The fourth place was given to Radium, the fifth to Antiseptics and Antitoxines, the sixth to Spectrum Analysis, and the seventh to the marvelous X-Ray. Had eight subjects been called for the Panama Canal would have had a place, for it lacked but eleven votes of tie for seventh place. It can, therefore, be called the eighth wonder of the modern world.
The recognition of Nature's elaboration of protective antitoxines has led to their artificial cultivation in the lower animals, and, thus produced, they have been used with brilliant results in the prevention and cure of at least one formidable disease, diphtheria.
It has never been dropped, and it never will be, save as such directly curative agents as the antitoxines are made available. In the early part of the century, except for gross anatomy and operative surgery, medicine was taught almost wholly, so far as the schools were concerned, by means of didactic lectures.
If the individual recovers quite independently of the artificial antitoxine, he does so in part because he has developed the antitoxines for counteracting the poison by his own powers. His cellular activities have, in other words, been for a moment at least turned in the direction of production of antitoxines.
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