New serum-therapy / by D. Montgomerie Paton.

Date:
1906
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: New serum-therapy / by D. Montgomerie Paton. 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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    gonorrhcea, syphilis, malaria, and locomotor ataxy. An in- jection of Haffkine's plague serum in my own arm and in that of a patient ran the usual course, in spite of the persistent concurrent use of the serum. The following pages give a short account of some of the theories suggested and work done, and the clinical papers illustrate the practical working of the serum in disease. Hundreds of other cases have been treated successfully, but those given are fairly representative. The clinical facts are first recorded, as it is on the facts of the case that it must stand or fall. The facts also were first seen, and the theory had to be found to explain them. It is discussed in the second half of the treatise. The first criticism which will be suggested is that this must be the new ' cure-all' if it will do all that is claimed for it. If antidiphtheritic serum is what is claimed for it, then it must necessarily do all that is here recorded, and much more. There is no half-way house. It must either increase resistance to the septic infection, wherever it is found and by whatever name it is called, or fail altogether. The use of simple plasmata by the same methods came later, and here all that may be said is that simple plasma of the sheep and horse are therapeutically interchangeable. Sheep, however, are killed when in the best of health and their resistance at its highest, while horses are killed only when they have ceased to be useful. Hence sheep plasma is much to be preferred. Both are resistant to tubercle, and their plasma is equally valuable in non-microbic conditions such as have been described. Ox plasma has been tested with good results in influenza, to which infection the ox is extremely resistant. The writer had 2 ounces of it in his last attack, and is satisfied that in that instance its effects were unmistakable. Further experience, however, will be necessary to enable much more to be said on this point. Horse plasma has been tested in typhoid, in which its food- I—2