The anti-toxin treatment of diphtheria / by John Glaister.

  • John Glaister
Date:
[1895?]
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: The anti-toxin treatment of diphtheria / by John Glaister. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by The University of Glasgow Library. The original may be consulted at The University of Glasgow Library.

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    y [FROM THE PROCEEDINGS OK THE PHILOSOPHICAL S CIETY OF GLASGOV\Mr The Anti-toxin Treatment of Diphtheria. Bv John Glaister, M.D., D.P.H.(Camb.), ttc, Professor of Forensic Medicine and Public Health, Saint Mungo's College, Glasgow. [Read before the Society, 20th March, 1S95.] There is probably no department of the science of medicine which has made more rapid and enormous advances during the last twenty-five years than that which has been named Preventive Medicine. This branch may be sub-divided into several sub- branches, all of which, working on different lines, and in different fields, have one common characteristic—namely, the discovery of the more occult processes of nature, whereby the health of man is afiected. While much has been done by general hygiene to remove and modify many factors which operate prejudicially upon the health of people in the mass, much has also been done in one special branch of preventive medicine—namely, in the bacteriological,— in the pursuit of those causes which produce infectious diseases, which pursuit has been rendered more successful by the use of the microscope in its higher powers, and by the use of culture fluids in which the difierent micro-organisms may be sown, grown, and multiplied. ■Microbes—literally, small living things—are to be found every- where in nature—in air, earth, water, within and without our bodies. They operate in curious ways and in divers places, conservatively and destructively, and are both the friend and the foe of man. They rid the earth of dead and decaying matter; they form new chemical compounds in the course of these operations; in their grosser and fungoid forms, they produce the alcoholic fermentation in suitable liquids; they make our sweet milk turn sour, our butter to become rancid, our bread to become mouldy; and perhaps the most serious action which they produce is to be found in a large number of the diseases of man and animals, while, in addition, they are the prime movers in the causation of all