Serums, vaccines and toxines in treatment and diagnosis.

  • William Cecil Bosanquet
Date:
1904
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Serums, vaccines and toxines in treatment and diagnosis. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by the Harvey Cushing/John Hay Whitney Medical Library at Yale University, through the Medical Heritage Library. The original may be consulted at the Harvey Cushing/John Hay Whitney Medical Library at Yale University.

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    these comparatively large, rod-shaped organisms can be seen lying in the capillaries of most of the organs, appear- ing in places actually to block up the blood-channels. The suggestion was therefore made that a process analogous to embolism—a blocking of the smaller blood-vessels by the masses of organisms—was the cause of the morbid symptoms. This view could not, however, be maintained in the presence of the fact, recognised Inter, that in other infective conditions the bacteria are comparatively few and far between, no such masses being found as occur in anthrax. In certain diseases it is even the case that the organisms remain localised in some one spot) ami do not enter the general blood-stream at all (diphtheria, tetanus). Another suggestion made was that the partite-. Beiced on the nourishment circulating in the blood, which \\ as necessary for the life of the tissue cells, and that so they practically starved the body, and produced their injorionj effects. This was obviously no more tenable than the former theory, for the same reason. Toxines.— Finally the true facts of the matter were discovered, viz. that the micro-organisms secrete, as the products of their vital activity, certain poisonous sub- stances, which kill or injure the cells of their host and so produce disease. Much valuable work has been done towards elucidating the nature of these poisons or toxines : ' and a very long list of substances of Virions kinds could be drawn up, to which the actual toxic powers have been attributed. Brieger isolated poisonous alkaloids from decomposing meat, ifcc, and considered that it was to this class of chemical substances that bacterial toxines belonged. 1 In tho following pages tlio word toxine is used in its original senss, viz a poisonous substance formed in the growth of bacb ria or other parasitic micro-organisms. It ha* been proposed to limit tliu us' ol the term to those bodies formed by bacteria to which antitoxinee (see ]>. IS) arc produced in infected animals, but in the present state of our knowledge of these bodies this restriction seems scarcely feasible. The term autism has bouii coined by Marx to 11. u the latter meaning.