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Updated: May 14, 2025
They keep in training. They don't say, like that poor old maunderer I read this morning, that there's no use preparing that a million phagocytes will spring to arms overnight if their country's invaded. They keep in trim. They fight quick. If they didn't we wouldn't be here." "These phagocytes is infantry, yes?" demanded Herman Vielhaber. "I never hear 'em named before like that."
He wiped froth from his waistcoat. "Pacifists!" he stormed. "Why don't they ever look into their own bodies? They couldn't live a day on non-resistance to evil. Every one of their bodies is thronged with fighting soldiers. Every pacifist is a living lie. Phagocytes, that's what they are white corpuscles and it's all they're there for. They believe in preparedness hard enough.
They are, to put it picturesquely, like oysters at the oyster-bar, peppered and vinegared "in no time," and then swallowed by the phagocytes by the dozen. This seems almost too comic a view of the deadly struggle of man and higher animals for health and freedom from the swarming pests which everywhere invade him. Yet it is correct, and involves a simple and fundamental truth.
The attempts to produce immunity by vaccination with weakened or localised disease germs is really an attempt to train and develop to a high point the activities of the phagocytes or eater-cells of the blood. He was "immune" to all poisons.
Until Sir Almroth Wright, following up one of Metchnikoff's most suggestive biological romances, discovered that the white corpuscles or phagocytes which attack and devour disease germs for us do their work only when we butter the disease germs appetizingly for them with a natural sauce which Sir Almroth named opsonin, and that our production of this condiment continually rises and falls rhythmically from negligibility to the highest efficiency, nobody had been able even to conjecture why the various serums that were from time to time introduced as having effected marvellous cures, presently made such direful havoc of some unfortunate patient that they had to be dropped hastily.
See 'em march up to fight when there's an invasion! And how they do fight! These pacifists belie their own construction. They're built on a fight from the cradle and before that. "I wish more of their own phagocytes would begin to preach non-resistance and try to teach great moral lessons to invading germs. We wouldn't have to listen to so many of 'em. But phagocytes don't act that way.
There should be no more difficulty in evolving an efficient army of phagocytes by natural selection, or in developing specific chemical reactions against *microscopic enemies, than there was in evolving the various nociceptors for our nerve-muscular defense against our *gross enemies.
Under these circumstances the individual commonly knows nothing of the matter. This conflict has taken place entirely without any consciousness on his part, and he may not even know that he has been exposed to the attack of the bacteria. In other cases the bacteria prove too strong for the phagocytes.
The question whether one shall suffer from a germ disease is not simply the question whether he shall be exposed, or even the question whether the bacteria shall find entrance into his body. It is equally dependent upon whether he has the bodily vigour to produce alexines in proper quantity, or to summon the phagocytes in sufficient abundance and vigour to ward off the attack.
The phagocytes absorb morbid matter, poisons or microorganisms by enveloping them with their own bodies. It is a hand-to-hand fight, and many of the brave little soldiers are destroyed by the poisons and bacteria which they attack and swallow.
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