1895.] Dr. G. Sims Woodhead on Diphtheria. 433 



WEEKLY EVENING MEETING, 

 Friday, February 8, 1895. 



Basil Woodd Smith, Esq. F.E.A.S. F.S.A. Vice-President, 

 in the Chair. 



German Sims Woodhead, M.D. 



The Antitoxic Serum Treatment of Diphtheria. 



The subject with which we shall deal to-night, though at first sight 

 of interest to the physician only, has been so fully discussed and 

 so bitterly and irrationally opposed, perhaps also unreasonably be- 

 lauded, that those who take even a general interest in the public 

 health, or who are wishful to obtain some insight into the practical 

 and scientific aspects of a new system of treatment, may well be 

 interested to know something of what is being so freely written up 

 in the columns of our daily newspapers. Beyond this, however, 

 many take a more personal interest in a method of treatment which 

 holds out promise of help in the cure or amelioration of the symptoms 

 and conditions met with in diphtheria, a disease which, very justly, is 

 looked upon as one of the most treacherous with which the physician 

 has to deal. To begin with, I should like to make a frank confession. 

 With that conservatism which is met with even in the most radical 

 of natures, many, of whom I was one, felt disposed to treat antitoxic 

 serum as belonging to the same group of substances as tuberculin, 

 around which was constructed a theory of which the laboratory 

 experimental basis, though apparently fair and firm, was as yet 

 insufficient for the support of the structure of therapeutic treatment 

 that was afterwards raised upon it. I followed the earlier experi- 

 ments on this new method with great attention ; I carefully analysed 

 the principles on which the method was founded, and then with some 

 misgivings watched the gradual development of the treatment as 

 applied to actual cases of diphtheria. I was inclined to receive the 

 statistics with great reserve, as I felt that this new method, like all 

 new methods of treatment, might be making cures in the minds of 

 the observer, and not on the bodies of the patients. Now, however, 

 I am convinced that whatever justification my incredulity may have 

 had from the consideration of previous experiments, none could be 

 claimed in connection with the experiments that were carried out 

 in the investigation of this special subject, and I am thoroughly 

 satisfied that, although the antitoxic serum treatment may not come 

 up to the expectations of all the rash writers on the subject — for 

 many people seem to think that it should be a specific against 

 diphtheria in all its stages — it promises, and this promise has in 



