Epidemic infantile paralysis (Heine-Medin disease) / Tr. by H. Ridley Prentice.

  • Römer, Paul Heinrich, 1876-
Date:
1913
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Epidemic infantile paralysis (Heine-Medin disease) / Tr. by H. Ridley Prentice. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by the Augustus C. Long Health Sciences Library at Columbia University and Columbia University Libraries/Information Services, through the Medical Heritage Library. The original may be consulted at the the Augustus C. Long Health Sciences Library at Columbia University and Columbia University.

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    content of the serum by specific treatment and thus to provide a serum of therapeutic value. They consider that Heine-Aledin disease produced artificially in monkeys is a much more serious disease than that occurring naturally in man. On the other hand,, we must remember that we are not in a position to use the serum so early in the disease in man as Flexner and Lewis were able to in monkeys. The only experiment carried out with human serum in man, as far as I know, was performed by Xobecourt and Darre. They gave an intraspinal injection of the serum, and state that symptoms of marked meningeal irritation set in three hours after the injection and continued for several days, but that no definite effect on the course of the paralysis could be observed. Considering how extra- ordinarily variable the course of the disease is, and how impossible it is to give a prognosis from the symptoms of the prodromal stage, it is evident that the value of serum therapy can be established only by means of a very large collection of statistics. At present the question is still in the experimental stage. [Xetter, Gendron, and Touraine report that the administration of serum from an old case of poliomyelitis into four acute cases resulted in improvement of three and the death of one case.— Translator.] III.—EXPERIMENTS WITH DRUGS. Fermi stated that the course of rabies, produced artificially in rabbits, was influenced in a favourable way by certain dyes, particu- larly by Trypan red. I therefore made some experiments on monkeys with this substance, but they were quite unsuccessful. Landsteiner and Levaditi used other substances, firstly arsacetin: — Two Macacus monkeys received, on the same day and in the same manner, intracerebral and intraperitoneal injections. The control became ill in seven days, and paralysed in eight. The other monkey was given subcutaneous injections of from '075 to '2 gr. arsacetin on the third, fifth, and sixth days after infection. It became ill on the seventh day and paralysed on the eighth. In a similar way they used arsenophenylglycin. Two Macacus monkeys were infected in the same way as in the preceding experiment. The control became paralysed in twelve days. The other monkey received a subcutaneous injection of '3 gr. arsenophenylglycin at the same time as it was infected. It became ill six days afterwards, and was completely paralysed in seven days. Radium and X-rays proved equally useless both for prevention and cure. Flexner and Clark recently turned their attention towards urotropin. Cushing and Crowe have shown that urotropin injected