Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Updated: June 16, 2025
In some marvelous fashion, which we do not even yet fully understand, the cells of the body are producing in ever-increasing quantities an anti-body, or antitoxin, which will unite with the toxin or poison produced by the hostile germs and render it entirely harmless. By a curious paradox of the process, it does not kill the germs themselves. It may not even stop their further multiplication.
Guinea-pigs fed on them in proper doses attain such a degree of immunity that, in a short time, they can tolerate four hundred times the fatal dose. The serum also can be used to neutralize the toxin in another animal, to a certain extent." We crowded about Kennedy and the doctor, our eyes riveted on the drawn face before us. Would the antitoxin work?
Primitive thought assumes a supernatural agency as the cause of disease, and seeks, logically, to placate it by prayer or coerce it by magic. Modern thought turns to test-tube and microscope, searches for the malignant germ, and manufactures an antitoxin. The history of human thought is, as Huxley said, a record of the substitution of mechanical for vitalistic processes.
As a result I had to administer antitoxin to eight of the younger members of the household, so careless had they been about the spread of this disease; indeed I have found that the isolation of patients suffering from contagious diseases is wholly unknown in China.
It is certain that a mere "sore throat," not serious enough to be diagnosed as diphtheria, cannot produce paralysis or heart-failure; but we know positively that the antitoxin can do it and does do it. The cases that Dr.
Pistor, a prominent Berlin physician, whose little daughter contracted a slight inflammation of the throat. The child was given an injection of antitoxin, and this was followed by a severe and protracted illness. Very significant, in this connection, are certain utterances of Dr. William Osler in his "Practice of Medicine."
None of these vaccines is so powerful, or so certain in its effects, as the diphtheria antitoxin.
Now, the assistant had been assistant long enough to know that excuses in the ordinary sense of the word did not pass current with Dr. Morgan. That gentleman had telegraphed for antitoxin, and said it was important that he should have it; therefore, antitoxin must be sent in spite of time-tables and forgetful butlers. Dr. Payson went into the waiting room and sat down to think.
It is customary in Germany to insert a death-notice in one of the local newspapers and to invite the friends of the family to the funeral. In his announcement in the columns of the "Lokalanzeiger," Dr. Langerhans stated explicitly that his little son had died after an injection of diphtheria antitoxin for immunization. Another similar case is that of Dr.
Small doses of the organism have been injected into animals; then, when they have recovered, larger ones, and so on, after the manner of the bacillus of diphtheria, until a powerful antitoxin can be obtained from their blood, very minute quantities of which will promptly kill the bacilli in a test-tube.
Word Of The Day
Others Looking