74 MICROBES AND HEALTH. 



of a horse or some other animal. The bacteriologists 

 claim this excites a counter-poison, and the blood 

 becoming charged with this counter-poison is drawn 

 from some of the animal's veins, and when injected into 

 the body of a human being having a disease produced 

 by this particular germ, it will destroy the germ and 

 effect a cure. This is called serum therapy. 



For years leading medical journals and prominent 

 physicians have claimed, and bacteriologists acknowl- 

 edge, that carbolic acid or other antiseptics are used 

 to prevent the decomposition of antitoxins; hence it is 

 claimed that any virtues which antitoxins possess are 

 due solely to the carbolic acid. 



A recent editorial in a leading medical journal says: 

 "If carbolic acid alone will do all that is claimed for 

 antitoxin, and the serum alone is inert if not poison- 

 ous, where is the sense in using an expensive humbug ? 

 Why make the patient pay fancy prices for a myth? 

 Why involve medicine in the obscurity of superstition 

 again ? Why support and give countenance to a fraud ? 

 Is or is not this quackery, even though it sit in high 

 places ?" 



Instinct teaches us that nature did not place in the 

 secretions of the lower animals the elements necessary 

 for the preservation of human life. Antitoxins and 

 the germ theory will run a natural course and die a 

 natural death, like other fads and delusions. 



There is one disease especially which bacteriologists 

 claim to cure with antitoxin, and that disease is diph- 

 theria; yet the fact that antitoxin statistics for diph- 



