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The horse's system straightway begins to elaborate the protective antitoxine, and there results from this one injection a sufficient amount of it to save the horse, although far too little to make the serum of his blood potent enough for medicinal use.
After a certain course of this treatment it is found that a portion of blood serum of the animal so treated will act in a curative way if injected into the blood of another animal, or a human patient, suffering with diphtheria. In other words, according to theory, an antitoxine has been developed in the system of the animal subjected to the progressive inoculations of the diphtheria toxine. In Dr.
The blood of a horse so treated is found to have the effect of neutralizing the diphtheria poison, although the blood of the horse before such treatment has no such effect. Thus there is developed in the horse's blood a quantity of the antitoxine, and now it may be used by physicians where needed.
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.
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