30 e ANNÉE 
MARS 1916 
N° 3 
ANNALES 
DE 
L’INSTITUT PASTEUR 
Mémoire publié à l’occasion du jubilé de E Metchnikoff. 
LOCAL SPECIFIC THERAPY OF INFECTIONS 
by SIMON FLEXNER. 
(From the Laboratories of The Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research, 
New-York.) 
Medicine possesses no universal remedies for the infectious 
diseases, and the more deeply bioiogical phenomena are 
studied, the more certain become the indications tliat no such 
class of remedies wiil be discovered. This probabilily follows 
from the fact of the specificity of celis — those composing on the 
one liand the structures of the host, or macroôrganism, and 
those comprising on the other the invading parasite or micro- 
ôrganism. 
Palhological processes are essentially local in characler. 
Pathogenic microôrganism do not attack and injure ail parts of 
the body equaliy and indifferently. Indeed, each microbe 
exhihits preferences as regards location in which to settle and 
to multiply. AVhen, as often happens, the entire body responds 
to the pathological process, it is hy reason of general efîects of 
far smaller degree than exist at the local seat of disease. It is 
at one lime the blood, at another the lymphatic glands, and at 
still another the central nervous organs, the kidneys, the 
intesiine, or other part that su(fer most. Hence the problem 
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