THE NONSPECIFIC AGENTS 15 



cedures, differing but in degree, we have the elements of the modern 

 nonspecific therapy, the absorption of a foreign protein (disintegrat- 

 ing autogenous material either burned tissue, disintegrating leuko- 

 cytes, fibrin or serum from an exudate) the reaction of the body to 

 this material with increased activity; stimulation of the bone marrow; 

 mobilization of leukocytes, of enzymes; the lessening of the nervous 

 irritability, etc. 



Counterirritation was, however, limited in its application to lo- 

 calized inflammatory conditions, differing in so far from the applica- 

 tion of the nonspecific methods at present in vogue. 



Calleja has but recently devised a method of therapy which he considers 

 an immunization against necrosis based essentially on these older methods. 

 Calleja assumes that the derivatives of empiric medicine, the blisters, the 

 fixation abscess, etc., owe their efficacy to the fact that they induce an 

 active and a passive immunization against the effects of the necrosis of 

 the tissues in the disease process. Subcutaneous injection of 3 or 4 drops 

 of chloroform at different points, to a total of from 3 to 5 c.c., is a con- 

 venient method of this "causticotherapy," and he supplements it with horse 

 serum prepared like diphtheria antitoxin, only using instead of diphtheria 

 bacilli, human tissue scraps rendered necrotic with chloroform. 



The term "counterirritation" and the theories advanced to ex- 

 plain the therapeutic measure in the treatment of disease have gone 

 out of fashion, together with the agents that were used for many 

 years. At times and under certain undetermined conditions results 

 were achieved by means of counterirritant measures that were quite 

 satisfactory. But counterirritation was a therapeutic measure abso- 

 lutely empirical in character and the fact that no possible theory of 

 modern medicine could account for its potential benefit was perhaps 

 one of the reasons that modern medicine discarded the practice. As 

 Gillies has expressed it, "The remedy, or let us say mode of treat- 

 ment, fell into disrepute not because it failed as a remedy or as a mode 

 of treatment, but for the very peculiar reason that we do not under- 

 stand and cannot explain how it succeeds, for it is allowed that not 

 infrequently it does succeed." Curiously enough we continued to 

 elaborate procedures that were obviously similar to counterirritation 

 both in character and in their therapeutic object, but under a variety 

 of new names and based on modern scientific theories of immunity. 

 So, for instance, the autoserotherapy used in pleural exudates whereby 

 a small amount of the pleural exudate is withdrawn and reinjected 

 under the skin of the patient, in mechanism analogous to the older 

 form of vesication. 



It was not, however, until within the last few years that the pos- 

 sibility was suggested by observers interested in nonspecific therapy 

 that the same mechanism that was concerned in the one was possibly 

 involved in the other; Luithlen has even ascribed the possible thera- 



