A HISTORY OF SCIENCE 



has used with success, an antitoxine from the microbe 

 of the plague which recently ravaged China. 



Dr. Calmette, another graduate of the Pasteur Insti- 

 tute, has extended the range of the serum-therapy to 

 include the prevention and treatment of poisoning by 

 venoms, and has developed an antitoxine that has al- 

 ready given immunity from the lethal effects of snake 

 bites to thousands of persons in India and Australia. 



Just how much of present promise is tentative, just 

 what are the limits of the methods these are questions 

 for the future to decide. But, in any event, there 

 seems little question that the serum treatment will 

 stand as the culminating achievement in therapeutics 

 of our century. It is the logical outgrowth of those ex- 

 perimental studies with the microscope begun by our 

 predecessors of the thirties, and it represents the pres- 

 ent culmination of the rigidly experimental method 

 which has brought medicine from a level of fanciful 

 empiricism to the plane of a rational experimental 

 science. 



