622 



SCIENCE 



[N. S. Vol. LII. No. 1357 



duced in healthy animals; and in protection by 

 vaccination, success is assured only to the ex- 

 tent to which the healthy body has been com- 

 pelled to prepare the specific immunity sub- 

 stances and to hold them ready at hand to 

 combat the entrance through its outer gateway 

 of, for instance, such microbes as those incit- 

 ing typhoid fever and smallpox. 

 I That it is through the prowess of the body 

 itself, and not the skill and art of the physi- 

 cian, that recovery from infectious disease 

 takes place, had already become evident to the 

 ablest physicians of nearly one hundred years 

 ago. It is true that they could form no real 

 conception of the manner in which the cure 

 was brought about, but in admitting the exist- 

 ence of a class of maladies which Jacob Bige- 

 low in 1835 called the " self -limiting diseases "''■ 

 this innate faculty of the organism to over- 

 come infection was recognized. It may be of 

 even more than historical interest to reprint 

 here the pregnant paragraph in which Bigelow 

 expresses this view : 



This deficiency of the healing art (he is now 

 writing of the advances in knowledge of the struc- 

 ture and functions of the human body in contrast 

 to the lagging behind of the science of therapeu- 

 tics, or the branch of knowledge by the application 

 of which physicians are expected to remove dis- 

 eases) is not justly attributable to any want of 

 sagacity or diligence on the part of the medical 

 profession. It belongs rather to the inherent dif- 

 ficulties of the case and is, after abating the effect 

 of errors and accidents, to be ascribed to the ap- 

 parent fact that certain morbid processes in the 

 human body have a definite and necessary career, 

 from which they are not to be diverted by any 

 known agents, with which it is in our power to 

 oppose them. To these morbid affections, the 

 duration of which, and frequently the event also, 

 are beyond the control of our present remedial 

 means, I have, on the present occasion, applied the 

 name of the self-limited diseases; and it will be 

 the object of this discourse to endeavor to show 

 the existence of such a class, and to inquire how 

 far certain individual diseases may be considered 

 as belonging to it. 



ANAPHYLAXIS 



Allusion has several times been made to the 

 hypersensitive state which is often regarded 



1 Jacob Bigelow, ' ' Discourse on Self -limited Dis- 

 eases," Boston, 1835. 



as the opposite of the immune condition. Be- 

 cause the latter is conceived as protective and 

 hence is spoken of as being prophylactic, the 

 former in turn has been named anaphylactic. 

 The obvious distinction between the two con- 

 ditions is simply defined by the statement that 

 while the immunized animal shows a greater 

 degree of resistance to a second inoculation of 

 the materials used for immunization, the ana- 

 phylactized animal on the contrary shows a 

 heightened susceptibility. 



, The history of anaphylaxis illustrates the 

 manner in which the rapidly growing knowl- 

 edge of immunity reacted on the appreciation 

 of this condition. It now appears that the 

 physiologist Magendi, who flourished in the 

 first quarter of the nineteenth century, first 

 noted that an animal which had borne without 

 apparent effect one injection of a quite harm- 

 less protein such as egg white, reacted severely 

 to a second injection of the same kind of mate- 

 rial given after an interval of days. No 

 further contemporary attention seems to have 

 been given to this isolated incident, and it was 

 not until 1894 that the speaker chanced again 

 upon the phenomenon. He was engaged upon 

 a study of the pathologic action of the toxal- 

 bumins, and his attention was attracted by 

 recent experiments on the similar globulicidal 

 (or red blood corpuscle destructive) action of 

 certain alien blood serums, such for example 

 as the serum of the dog for the red globules of 

 the rabbit. Since animals could be rendered 

 immune to the toxalbumins, the attempt was 

 made to make rabbits immune to dog's serum, 

 but without success. On the contrary, it was 

 found that animals which had withstood one 

 dose of dog's serum succumbed to a second 

 dose given after the lapse of some days or 

 weeks, even when this dose was sublethal for a 

 control animal. 



Again the observation fell on stony soil, as 

 indeed subsequent ones were destined to do a 

 few years later and, as it now appears, chiefiy 

 because knowledge of and interest in the gen- 

 eral subject of immunity had not progressed 

 far enough at that x>eriod to present to the 

 contemplation of the " prepared mind," to use 



