THERAPEUTIC MEASURES 115 







In both instances, the preventive and curative action can 

 be explained by a progressive neutralization of the antibody 

 in excess which results in making the organism return to the 

 normal state following a new injection of the same antigen 

 and in the two cases "prophylaxis" or therapy confers very 

 rapidly on the organism a temporary anti-anaphylactic 

 immunity, but a new dose of the antibody will establish the 

 preceding anaphylactic condition even more acutely. 



The anti-anaphylactic vaccination of Besredka as well as 

 the bacteriotherapy of Wright are discoveries due to one of 

 those happy chances in the course of experiments which have 

 revealed to the experimenters facts which they did not seek 

 but which, from the practical point of view, have shown them- 

 selves to be more important than those which they did seek. 



And it is interesting to realize that this principle of anti- 

 anaphylactic vaccination should arise from the false idea 

 that antitoxic vaccination should lead to an anti-anaphy- 

 lactic analogous to antitoxin (Roseneau, Anderson, Otto) 

 quite in the same way as bacteriotherapy (or vaccine 

 therapy) arose in the mind of Wright from anti-infectious 

 vaccination (anti-anthrax vaccination, and the treatment of 

 rabies: Pasteur, Roux, Chamberland) . Nobody has sought 

 to establish any relation whatever between those two phe- 

 nomena, 



Besredka was far from doubting when an anaphylactic 

 shock was aborted by his successive injections, that he 

 obtained the same results by reactions identical to those of 

 Wright with his vaccine therapy, but if Besredka reached 

 little by little an exact conception or at least the only prob- 

 able conception of the mechanism of anti-anaphylactic 

 vaccination, the explanation of the facts of bacteriotherapy 

 is still and will always be an " article of faith," or a "religion" 

 for all those who pretend to see in the pathologic manifesta- 

 tions of an infectious disease the effects of a poison and 

 nothing else and in the recovery an "antitoxic virtue" of a 

 drug or serum. 



Moreover close inspection will reveal that the mechanism 

 of vaccination and of the treatment of anaphylaxis is simple 

 and easy of explanation only when previous vaccinating or 



