TETANUS ANTITOXIN 



163 



The Medical News, ist June 1901, has the follow- 

 ing note :— " H. G. Wells states that tetanus is 

 endemic in Chicago, the specific organism being 

 present in the dirt of the streets. Every Fourth of 

 July an epidemic occurs, because these bacilli are 

 carried deeply into wounds before wads from blank 

 cartridges. . . . The writer thinks that such cases 

 should receive a prophylactic dose, say, 5 c.c. of 

 tetanus antitoxin, as soon as possible after the 

 wound is first seen. It seems certain that if anti- 

 toxin prophylaxis were adopted, there would be no 

 further Fourth of July epidemics, and this end 

 would justify the means/' 



Again, a man might receive a lacerated wound 

 under conditions especially favourable to infection : 

 he might tear his hand in a stable where horses 

 had died of tetanus, or he might cut his finger while 

 he was working at the disease in a pathological 

 laboratory, or he might receive a poisoned arrow- 

 wound out in Africa. In any such emergency, he 

 could safeguard his life with a protective dose of the 

 antitoxin. 



It remains to be added, that the modern study of 

 tetanus has brought into more general use the old 

 rule that the wounded tissues in a severe case of 

 tetanus should be at once excised. Before Nicolaier's 

 work, while the theory still survived that the disease 

 was due to ascending inflammation of a nerve, this 

 rule was neither enforced nor explained. 



