Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
But though a few doctors have now learnt the danger of inoculating without any reference to the patient's "opsonic index" at the moment of inoculation, and though those other doctors who are denouncing the danger as imaginary and opsonin as a craze or a fad, obviously do so because it involves an operation which they have neither the means nor the knowledge to perform, there is still no grasp of the economic change in the situation.
Clinical Use of Vaccines. Vaccines should not be given while a patient is in a negative phase, as a certain amount of the opsonin in the blood is used up in neutralising the substances injected, and this may reduce the opsonic index to such an extent that the vaccines themselves become dangerous.
It would have become necessary to denounce opsonin in the trade papers as a fad and Sir Almroth as a dangerous man if his practice in the laboratory had not led him to the conclusion that the customary inoculations were very much too powerful, and that a comparatively infinitesimal dose would not precipitate a negative phase of cooking activity, and might induce a positive one.
It attaches itself to them: that is the essential fact. In many of us the phagocytes are not at a given moment so "avid" of this or that disease-microbe as they should be in order to protect us from its multiplication and poison production. The dead microbes answer this purpose; they excite the production of the opsonin appropriate to them and yet are not themselves dangerous, since they are dead.
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.
By the time this preface is in print the kaleidoscope may have had another shake; and opsonin may have gone the way of phlogiston at the hands of its own restless discoverer. I will not say that Hahnemann may have gone the way of Diafoirus; for Diafoirus we have always with us. But we shall still pick up all our knowledge in pursuit of some Will o' the Wisp or other.
It is proved that this aroused avidity of the phagocytes is due to no change in the phagocytes themselves; since if they are transferred to the serum of a normal man they show no such predilection for the special invading microbe. The "opsonin," or "relish," is something exuded into or produced in the blood fluid when the attacking microbe arrives.
Word Of The Day