BACTERIOLOGY. 



tives. This doctrine was set forth still more 

 lucidly in 1833, upon the basis of the funda- 

 mental proposition laid down by the German 

 veterinarian Lux, that all contagious diseases 

 carry in their own contagious matter, the 

 remedy for their own cure. Formerly, this 

 principle was called Isopathy, now it is called 

 " Specific Therapy," in order that we may 

 avoid the appearance of having learned any- 

 thing from our predecessors, or of causing it 

 to seem as if scientific medicine had any rela- 

 tions whatever with such scorned doctrines as 

 Isopathy or Homeopathy. In reality, it is the 

 same dogma in another garb. Lux, for ex- 

 ample, prepared hydrophobin against rabies, 

 variolin against small-pox, pneumophthisin 

 against consumption Koch now calls it tu- 

 berculin and Klebs anti-phthisin and scar- 

 latin against scarlet fever. But the chief dif- 

 ference in the preparations of Lux, was that 

 the first was prepared for the dog, the others 

 for the cat. 



The fact has already been mentioned (p. 317) 

 that, before Behring and Kitasato, Ferran, 

 Hericourt and Richet, and Babes and Lepp 

 sought and with partial success, to cure infec- 

 tions already in progress by the use of protect- 

 ive serum. Waggish philologists maintain, to 

 be sure, that the practice is even much older, 



