256 him to their physiology! They had a "maximum power of 

 phagocytosis and cleared the blood stream of foreign particles 

 within a very few minutes.' ' Wherry had great confidence in 

 these "normal but swollen" cells, for, said he, "leucocytes are 

 more active when they are hydrated." The white cells of the 

 blood that carry granules which stain red with a dye called 

 eosin (the eosinophils) had always intrigued him. Said he: 



They are called forth in response to local or general anaphy- 

 lactic shock — occur in all "sensitivity" conditions, e g asthma, 

 sinusitis, mucous colitis and various inflammations of the skin. 

 The nature of the substances which call them forth is un- 

 known but they are probably products of autolysis derived 

 from tissues or from parasites. 



The eosinophiles appear in large number in individuals 

 infested of worms. They had long been known to appear in 

 asthma; what interested Wherry was that they were present, 

 too, in colitis, sinusitis, and various skin diseases. This made 

 the latter a "kind of asthma" — meaning that the mechanism 

 back of the symptomatology of all of them (edema, mucous 

 secretion, involuntary muscle spasm, aggregation of eosino- 

 philes) was probably the same. All were the product of foreign 

 protein intoxication — sometimes gotten from unusual foods, 

 from pollen or other "dusts" — but, in Wherry's instances 

 from the proteins of bacteria themselves, resident within the 

 victim. That is why he saw all of them as sensitizations, made 

 worse by renewed intoxication or infection; why he would, 

 by proper vaccine therapy, desensitize and so cure the victim. 



He told quickly the story of a century and a quarter of 

 such prophylactic and therapeutic immunization. Edward 

 Jenner had started it in 1796 by "vaccinating" the human 

 race with the "living, attenuated virus" of cowpox, to protect 

 the race against the more virulent form of the disease, the 

 smallpox. Louis Pasteur (some seventy-five years later) had 

 not changed things much with his antirabic injections, for he, 

 too, had used a living organism to produce immunity. Change 

 came in the late eighties when the Spaniard Juan Ferran re- 

 sorted to a killed culture of cholera to protect against infection 

 with the living organism. Waldemar Mordecai Wolff Haffkine 

 (* 1860, Russia) continued these "vaccinations"; adding to 



