COMBATING PARASITIC BACTERIA. 185 



CURATIVE MEDICINE. 



Bacteriology has hitherto contributed less to 

 curative than to preventive medicine. Neverthe- 

 less, its contributions to curative medicine have 

 not been unimportant, and there is promise of 

 much more in the future. It is, of course, unsafe 

 to make predictions for the future, but the accom- 

 plishments of the last few years give much hope 

 as to further results. 



It was at first thought that a knowledge of 

 the specific bacteria which cause a disease would 

 give a ready means of finding specific drugs for 

 the cure of such disease. If a definite species of 

 bacterium causes a disease and we can cultivate 

 the organism in the laboratory, it is easy to find 

 some drugs which will be fatal to its growth, and 

 these same drugs, it would seem, should be valu- 

 able as medicines in these diseases. This hope 

 has, however, proved largely illusive. It is very 

 easy to find some drug which proves fatal to the 

 specific germs while growing in the culture media 

 of the laboratory, but commonly these are of little 

 or no use when applied as medicines. In the first 

 place, such substances are usually very deadly poi- 

 sons. Corrosive sublimate is a substance which 

 destroys all pathogenic germs with great rapidity, 

 but it is a deadly poison, and can not be used as a 

 drug in sufficient quantity to destroy the parasitic 

 bacteria in the body without at the same time 

 producing poisonous effects on the body itself. 

 It is evident that for any drug to be of value in 

 thus destroying bacteria it must have some spe- 



