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Physiology. — “Contributions to the Study of serumanaphylaais” 
(Ast communication). By J. G. Srueswisk, Foreign Member of the 
Pasteur Institute at Brussels. (Communicated by Prof. SPRONCK). 
(Communicated in the meeting of January 30, 1909). 
Of late the problem of anaphylaxis has attracted the particular 
attention of more than one investigator of immunity. On the one 
side the purpose is to answer the purely scientific question, how 
hypersensibility has to be explained, which in an organism may 
appear with respect to very different albuminous substances after 
such a material in some way or other has formerly been assimilated 
by the organism in question. But on the other hand the practical 
serumtherapy wishes to be delivered from the difficulties of the 
serumdisease, and tries to find means of preventing the dangers which, 
already with the first injection, but still oftener with an injection 
that is repeated not too soon, threaten the patient. 
In the meantime the sphere of investigation has been examined 
in many a direction, the literature is increasing, but theory has still 
too frequently to complete what is wanting in a useful supply 
of facts. Therefore an extension of the latter is very desirable, if 
new points of view offer themselves there. This communication is to 
furnish a contribution to this. It contains in a few words some 
results of the first part of an investigation which was made in the 
Pasteur Institute at Brussels and which had the phenomenon of the 
serumanaphylaxis for its subject. 
The literature will only be referred to, as far as this is strictly 
necessary to elucidate my explanation *). 
It was THEOBALD SmitH who had observed that guinea-pigs which 
had served for the titration of diphtheria-serum, and which accordingly 
had been treated previously with small quantities of diphtheriatoxine 
and antitoxic horse-serum, after a certain period of incubation had 
become extremely sensitive to a second injection of horse-serum, 
that they reacted thereupon as upon the administration of a strong 
poison and — in proportion to the dose — very often perished. 
Orto proved that with nothing but horse-serum (without toxine) this 
hypersensitiveness was also obtained, whilst RoseNav and ANDERSON 
proved that also with the aid of other sera such an anaphylactic 
state could be called into life, and that for each serum in a specific 
1) For an ampler discussion about the present state of the problem I beg to 
refer to a critical study from my own hand, which is shortly to appear in the 
“Zeitschrift fiir lmmunitätsforschung und experimentelle Therapie’. 
