116 THERAPEUTIC MEASURES 



curative antigens are specific or homologous (autogenous 

 vaccines). The mechanism is singularly complicated when 

 it is attempted to associate the identical results obtained by 

 non-specific antigens especially by the skeptophylaxis of 

 Ancel and Bouin or by the tachyphylaxis of Gley and 

 Champy, with lymphotherapy from the preventive point 

 of view or with chemotherapy from the curative point of 

 view. In skepto- or tachyphylaxis, whose discovery in 1880 1 

 may be considered chronologically, as the origin of all the 

 researches on anaphylaxis and bacteriotherapy, the crises 

 of anaphylaxis can be aborted by a vaccination injection of 

 any antigen whatever (Roger and Josue Lambert, Ancel and 

 Bouin). 



In proteosotherapy, Rumpf used injections of sterilized 

 cultures of pyocyaneus with success in typhoid fever (1893); 

 Hallopeau and Roger cultures of streptococci and of prodi- 

 giosus in tuberculous lupus (1896) and quite recently Ch. 

 Nicolle, James W. Jobling and his numerous collaborators, 

 Bull, Dunklin, Eggstein, Manier, Peterson, and others, 

 have obtained undoubted results in treating acute and 

 chronic rheumatoid arthritis of unknown origin by different 

 proteoses, peptones or bacterial bodies. 



In lymphoserotherapy (Baillon, Artaud, de Vevey, etc.) 

 as well as in chemotherapy, it is quite impossible to imagine 

 the direct action of the particular antigen on the antibody in 

 excess as in proteosotherapy. 



From this is the conclusion that either the mechanism of 

 anti-anaphylactic vaccination and that of specific bacterio- 

 therapy are different from those of tachyphylaxis, of proteoso- 

 and of chemotherapy; or else the explanation which we have 

 just given is inexact or more or less incomplete. 



The experimental material at our actual disposal does not 

 permit us to answer this question in a sufficiently exact way. 

 What we can say with certainty is that if the effects obtained 



1 A. Schmidt Mulheim has shown that a non-pathogenic dose of peptone 

 rendered an animal insusceptible to a pathogenic dose injected shortly after 

 the first (Beitrage zur Kentniss des Peptons, etc., Arch. f. Physiol., 1880). 



About the same time, Woolbridge established the same result by paren- 

 teral injections of organ extracts and Martin (Australia) by parenteral 

 injections of certain venins. 



