448 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY 



horses. The best treatment of this kind, in my opinion, is the vaccina- 

 tion procedure of Besredka. In this method a very small quantity of 

 horse serum is given subcutaneously or even rectally and time allowed 

 for its absorption. The amount absorbed at any time will be too small 

 to cause serious symptoms and yet enough to produce anti-anaphylaxis. 

 After anti-anaphylaxis has been established, and this occurs quite rap- 

 idly, the full dose may be given subcutaneously with some safety. The 

 only objection to this procedure is that time, an hour or two, is lost. 

 The time could be shortened probably, though at some risk. Besredka 

 has obtained good results with the method in guinea-pigs, and it should 

 receive a full clinical trial. 



Friedberger and Mita have recently described another method by 

 means of which they were able to protect guinea-pigs against ten times 

 the fatal dose. This result was obtained by a slow intravenous infusion 

 of serum so that only traces enter the circulation at one time. The 

 time of infusion lasted fifty to sixty minutes in their experiments. 

 It will be observed that the same principle used by Besredka, the pro- 

 duction of anti-anaphylaxis, is here also utilized. 



The treatment for hayfever has already been mentioned. 



Importance of Anaphylaxis. — The phenomena of anaphylaxis which 

 have been briefly discussed in the preceding pages are important because 

 they have given us a deeper insight into certain interesting diseases, 

 the so-called idiosyncrasies or predispositions whose causation was 

 formerly inexplicable. The remarkable fact is now established that an 

 organism may be so altered by the injection of an apparently perfectly 

 harmless proteid, that a subsequent injection of the same proteid acts 

 like a violent poison. Predisposition of an individual to any substance 

 means now that this individual is sensitized to this substance. How 

 this sensitization has been accomplished is still undecided in many 

 instances, but the basic conceptions of anaphylaxis will be a safe guide 

 in solving the problem. 



It must be emphatically pointed out that the analysis of anaphy- 

 lactic phenomena would have been impossible without animal experi- 

 mentation; the chief advances have been made by the functional in- 

 vestigation of these disturbances in laboratory animals and not by 

 tissue examination after death. Thus the autopsies of those early 

 unfortunate cases where death resulted from the administration of a 

 therapeutic serum, yielded no information whatsoever regarding the 

 cause of exitus. The physicians stood before a riddle, the more terrible 

 because its nature was unknown. Animal experimentation has ex- 

 plained this fatal enigma, partially at least, and the physician no longer 

 stands in helpless ignorance before it. He knows the state now, and 

 some methods to prevent or reduce its dangers have been placed at his 

 disposal which promise a fair success. 



