HOW THE BODY FIGHTS DISEASE 



His dramatic cures of the dreaded hydrophobia in- 

 stantly gave his ideas a world- wide vogue, and in 

 scarce any land of the earth were there lacking eager 

 spirits to follow out and explore the paths thus so 

 brilliantly opened up. 



A little later came the discovery, at the hands 

 of two of Pasteur's disciples, that the serum of in- 

 oculated animals the colorless fluid of the blood 

 after the red corpuscles which it contains have 

 been strained out contains an anti-poison, or, 

 as it has come to be known, an antitoxin, which, 

 injected into an animal, confers immunity in the 

 same manner as inoculation itself. This was the 

 beginning of "the new medicine," of the so-called 

 " sero- therapy." If the new methods have not yet 

 realized all that was hoped from them, it may still 

 be noted that a single one of the new serums, the 

 preparation of the diphtheria antitoxin, has al- 

 ready saved thousands of little lives, and that the 

 horrible fate of death from hydrophobia is now 

 almost unknown. Anti-poisons for many of the 

 serpent venoms are known, so that the other day, 

 when Dr. Calmette, of Lille, who has made this 

 latter field so much his own, was bitten in the 

 careless handling of a deadly adder, he had merely 

 to step across the room and inject into his arm the 

 serum of his own preparation. Without the latter, 

 in a few moments he would have been dead; with 



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