IMMUNITY AND ANTITOXINS 24$ 



profoundly affecting the general nutrition, and (3) that they 

 are sensitive to the action of heat in a way that no chemical 

 poisons are known to be. If they are considered as fer- 

 ments, they must be substances which have a peculiar affin- 

 ity for certain tissues of the body on which they produce 

 their special toxic effect. As for the products of digestion, 

 they are formed either by the bacillus ingesting the proteid 

 and discharging it as albumose, or the digestion occurs by 

 means of a ferment secreted by the bacillus in the body of 

 an individual or animal suffering from the disease. 



Sidney Martin suggests that anthrax produces albumoses 

 and an alkaloidal substance, the former producing fever, the 

 latter stupor. In tetanus the bacillus produces a secretion 

 of the bacillus which causes the convulsions. The albumoses 

 present in this disease are probably due to the secretory 

 toxin. In diphtheria, too, we have a secretory poison in 

 the membrane and in the tissues, and an albumose which is 

 possibly the result of the secretion. It will be seen that 

 these views differ in some particulars from those to which 

 we have already referred. 



However the details of the modus operandi of the form- 

 ation of toxins are finally settled, we know that there comes 

 a time when the disease symptoms vanish, the disease de- 

 clines, and the patient recovers. Many of the older schools 

 of medicine explained this satisfactory phenomenon by 

 saying that this disease exhausted itself after having " gone 

 through " the body. In a sense that idea is probably true; 

 but recently a large number of investigators have applied 

 themselves to this problem, and with some promising results. 



Various protective inoculations against anthrax were prac- 

 tised as early as 1881, and the protected animals remained 

 healthy. In 1887 Wooldridge succeeded in protecting rab- 

 bits from anthrax by a new method, by which he showed 

 that the growth of the anthrax bacillus in special culture 

 fluids gave rise to a substance which, when inoculated, con- 



