THE STORY OF NINETEENTH-CENTURY SCIENCE 



with the collaboration of his former colleagues of the 

 Pasteur Institute, has developed, and has used with sue* 

 cess, 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 experimental studies 

 with the microscope begun by our predecessors of the 

 thirties, and it represents the present culmination of the 

 rigidly experimental method which has brought medi- 

 cine from a level of fanciful empiricism to the plane of 

 a rational experimental science. 



