Vill 
THYROID THERAPY IN SOME INFECTIOUS 
DISEASES 
By Dr. J. KooPMAN, The Hague, Holland 
The possibilities of organotherapy in the treatment 
of infectious diseases have until quite recently been very 
poorly studied. This may astonish workers in the field 
of endocrinology; but none the less, it is quite compre- 
hensible. In many other diseases where organotherapy 
has been tried, the control of the effect is often difficult 
or even impossible. Doctor, as well as patient, may 
suggest to themselves much that another perhaps would 
never be able to observe. I do not hesitate to assert 
that this is the reason why more nonsense has been 
written about the interesting and highly useful subject 
of organotherapy than any other medical topic. In 
the organotherapy of the infectious diseases, with 
which I shall deal in this paper (syphilis, typhoid 
fever), all phantasy and imagination is excluded and 
suggestion impossible, as the serological methods of ex- 
amination give us a mathematical certainty of the cor- 
rectness of our views. 
In syphilis, the Wassermann test may be used as an 
indicator; in typhoid fever, the formation of agglu- 
tinins. Since two reactions belong, with many others, 
to the reactions on antibodies, I shall first try to give 
a general view of the influence of the thyroid on the 
formation of antibodies. The first opinion I found on 
this subject is formulated by Charrin (1), who stated 
that removal of the thyroid diminished the natural im- 
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