On preventive inoculation / by W.M. Haffkine.

Date:
[1899?]
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: On preventive inoculation / by W.M. Haffkine. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh. The original may be consulted at the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh.

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    places was that the proportion of deaths to cases was not changed by the treatment. Thus, in the observations made in a camp of coolies of the Assam- Burmah Railway Survey, out of thirty-three attacked among the uninoculated portion of the camp twenty-nine died, and of four attacked among the inoculated all four died. In the Durbhanga prison out of eleven uninoculated attacked all eleven died, while five inoculated attacked lost three. In the Gaya gaol twenty uninoculated attacked lost ten, and eight inoculated attacked lost five. In a group of tea plantations in Assam 154 cases in uninoculated had sixty deaths, fifteen cases in inoculated had four. In the East Lancashire Eegiment in Lucknow 120 uninoculated attacked had 79 deaths, and 18 inoculated attacked had 13. This circumstance, the non-reduction of the case mortality by a treatment which influenced unmistakably the case incidence, appears an astonishing divergence from the result of small-pox vaccination, where both the number of attacks and their fatality are reduced by the treatment. The new aspect of the problem of preventive inoculation which thus presented itself in these observations on human communities consisted in the possibility of a prophylactic treatment being directed separately towards the reduction of the number of attacks, leaving the fatality of the disease unchecked, and towards the mitigating of the character of the disease and the reduction of the case mortality in those who get attacked. Possible relation behveen Immunity from Attack a nd Resistance to actual Symptoms of Disease. In analysing the nature of this particular result, the following two facts well known in laboratory practice presented themselves to me as of essential significance. In patients who recover from an infectious disease the pathogenic microbe does not disappear from their body for a considerable time after their recovery. It does not do them harm any longer, though when transferred to another animal it may still cause a fatal attack. .Similarly, as in the case, for instance, of a guinea-pig inoculated with the bacillus of chicken cholera, a naturally immune animal can breed for weeks, in an abscess, microbes of an intense virulence without in the least suffering in its own general health. A condition seems to set in in the convalescent patient, or to exist in naturally immune animals, by virtue of which they do not sxiffer from the results of activity of a pathogenic microbe, i.e., from its morbid products ; and from that t ime tin: presence of t he microbe in I lie system, even in
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