On prophylactic inoculation against plague and pneumonia.

  • Waldemar Haffkine
Date:
1914
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: On prophylactic inoculation against plague and pneumonia. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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

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    who developed undoubted symptoms of plague within a few hours after inocula- tion. (Section 38 :) {Dr. Riiffer.)—How many hours after inoculation ?—The inoculations were performed between four and six o'clock (in the afternoon) and the buboes appeared the same evening, i ., (Section 44 :) i repeat that the second conclusion drawn from the Byculla observations was that the prophy- lactic was powerless to arrest symptoms already started or which developed a few hours after inoculation. (Section 45 :) {The President.)—! understand that you mean in that dose ?—Yes, certainly. The next deduction was that not only did the prophylactic do no harm to persons already infected, but that there was the possibility of its influencing the disease in the incubation period, in an indivi- dual infected three or four days previously. This conclusion was based on the following consideration. You have observed that from the time of inoculation, day after day, with the exception of one day, the fourth after inoculation, cases of plague occurred among the non-inoculated group of prisoners. The incubation period of plague, according to the facts collected up to now, appears to be between two and ten days. A large proportion of the non-inoculated patients were, therefore, likely to have been infected already on the day when we dealt with the prisoners. Such being the state of aflairs in the non-inoculated group, and seeing that the inoculated had been living under the same conditions and had had the same chances of infection as the non-inoculated, I had ground to infer that a similar group were infected in the inoculated also at the time when they were inoculated. Under these conditions, the reduction of the number of cases and the suppression of deaths among them pointed to the possibility of inoculation influencing the disease in the incubation stage.... (Section 47:) The time necessary for the plague prophylactic to produce a useful effect is shorter than in any preventive treatment known, this period being in the anti-cholera inoculation four days, in vaccination against small-pox seven days, in the inoculation against anthrax twelve days, in the inoculation against rabies fifteen days, and in the present treatment apparently less than 24 hours. This conclusion was drawn from the fact that the beneficial difference between the inoculated and the non-inoculated appeared from the next morning after inoculation. The third question which was to be decided was answered in this mamier :—the question was how long would the 1 Vide the Commission's Report, Vol. V, p. 197, table summarising the events in the Byculla House of Correction. The dates corresponding to what is referred to in that table as i\Ir. HatTkino's figures are, aa explained by mo in a letter to the Commission, those of tlie first manifestation of tlie disease ; the dates corres- ponding to what is mentioned as the Official figures are those on which the patients were transferred from the observation ward to the plague hospital, and were reported officially as plague occurrences in the jail.