THE SCIENCE AND ART OF PROTEAL THERAPY 141 



one chance in a thousand to live, and that chance conditioned on 

 her going at once to the mountains. Nine months later this pa- 

 tient seemed clinically well, and the blood record was : Haemo- 

 globin 85; red corpuscles, 5,165,000; white corpuscles, 5,500, 

 an absolutely satisfactory numerical count. 



TUBERCULOSIS AND PROTEIN POISONING 



It is my personal view that an advanced case of pulmonary 

 tuberculosis represents a condition in which the chief menace 

 is not from toxins directly developed by the tubercle bacillus 

 itself, but from toxins generated by mixed infections plus the 

 toxic products of partial proteolysis of the tissues making up 

 the lung mass. 



Stated otherwise, I regard a tubercular mass as a foreign 

 growth which may have the same effect on the blood, the blood- 

 forming organs, and the organism at large as the types of foreign 

 growths that we term malignant neoplasms. The tuberculosis 

 patient, like the cancer patient, dies ultimately either of hemor- 

 rhage or of protein poisoning. In the latter case (and this may 

 be said to represent the normal progress of pathological events, 

 if the phrase be permitted), the same kind of strain is put upon 

 the blood-forming organs, and the same disturbances of the 

 blood cells are brought about in tuberculosis and in cancer. 

 Clinically, the cachexia of the late stage tuberculosis patient 

 and that of the late stage cancer patient cannot be distinguished 

 one from the other. I have seen two patients side by side, both 

 cachetic to the verge of moribundity, one having a solidified lung 

 and the other a carcinoma of the stomach, yet so closely similar 

 in general appearance that even a practiced eye could not deter- 

 mine which patient had the injured lung and which the injured 

 stomach. What could be determined at a glance was that both 

 patients manifested profound disturbances of metabolism, char- 

 acterized by lack of good red blood. Both of them have blood- 

 forming organs that have overworked against persistent protein 

 invasion until they have reached the stage of sheer exhaustion. 



Under the microscope, the blood of these two patients may be 

 as similar in its abnormalities (decrease of red corpuscles, in- 

 crease of white, preponderance of polynuclears, qualitative modi- 

 fications) as their clinical manifestations of malnutrition are 

 similar. 



When we consider the matter in this light, it no longer seems 

 strange that administration of the same treatment to these two 

 patients may be beneficial to both. A few drops of Proteal from 

 the same ampule may be administered hypodermically in succes- 

 sion to the tubercular and cancerous patients respectively day by 



