I 
76 JAMES LAW. 
the germ which is confined to the narrow area of tissue where 
it was inoculated, or, in the other case, to the circulating 
blood into which it was thrown. More than this, as I hope 
to show later, the ptomaines and other poisons have been ex¬ 
perimentally used in medicine—apart from the living germs— 
for at least eleven years past, so that the separation of these 
chemical poisons from their living bacteridian sources and 
their employment in medicine is not a new thing, nor was 
the justly famous Koch the first to use them apart from the 
living microbes for this purpose. 
The new departure now made by Koch is not, therefore, 
the separation of the ptomaines and tox-albumins from the 
living microbes for medicinal use—that had already been 
accomplished—it is rather the application of such separated 
chemical poisons to the cure of already existing disease. 
Koch’s departure has been the introduction of these agents 
intg the field of therapeutics,—they had already been intro¬ 
duced into prophylactics. 
The only apparent exception to this is in the method of 
Pasteur, for the protection of the individual bitten by a rabid 
animal. But this is no real exception, because, first, the Pas* 
teurean inoculations for rabies are not made with the chemical 
products alone, but with these plus the microbes, at first of 
a low vitality and potency, and then day by day of a stronger 
and stronger quality : 2d, The Pasteurean inoculations for 
rabies and prophylactic being intended to habituate the brain 
,and other nerve centers to the action of the soluble chemical 
poisons, while the living microbe is still confined to the region 
of the bite, so that such centers shall have acquired an insus¬ 
ceptibility before the living germ can reach them in a viable 
condition. The tardy progress of the microbe of rabies to 
the nerve centers is based on the fact that the blood is highly 
inimical to the life of this germ. 
From the standpoint of this role of the ptomaines, etc., I 
propose to shortly canvass Koch’s method and some of its 
precursors, and to inquire into a number of the successive 
steps through which the science of medicine has advanced to 
its present state in this line of prophylaxis, and, it must now 
