The use of the antitoxin to the toxin of diphtheria is most efficacious in curing that disease, and the treatment has caused a great fall in the death-rate.
Less success has been achieved when the disease is fully established, but if the antitoxin be injected immediately after the wound has been incurred, then the subsequent development of the disease is prevented.
This can be done either by supplying it with antitoxin from an outside source, or helping it to make its ownantitoxin by giving it dead germs to practise on.
It is as safe to take salvarsan at the hands of an expert as it is to take ether for an operation or to take antitoxin for diphtheria, and that is saying a good deal.
In diphtheria, nowadays, we help the body out promptly by supplying it with antitoxin from an outside source, before it has time to make any for itself.
Now, if antitoxin is used on the first or second day of the disease ninety-eight out of every hundred children recover.
In severe cases suspected to be diphtheria the doctor always gives diphtheria antitoxinat once.
In the days before we had antitoxin one out of every three children who had diphtheria died.
For this reason, whenever a case of diphtheria is discovered, the doctor injects the antitoxin not only into the patient, but also, as a protective against the disease, into those who have come into contact with the patient.
It is one of the least dangerous when promptly treated with antitoxin; it is one of the most dangerous when the antitoxin treatment is not given, or is delayed or insufficient.
Whenever antitoxin is given to a person ill with diphtheria it should be given in one dose, large enough and early enough.
Antitoxin is a prompt and an absolute remedy if used soon after the onset of the disease.
For that reason a physician should always be called because if it is "true" croup antitoxin must be given at once.
When antitoxin is given late (the third or fourth day of the disease) it is much less efficacious and must be given in relatively larger doses.
The difficulty here again is that if we wait till the diphtheritic membrane covers the whole throat, antitoxin will not be of much use.
Since the introduction ofantitoxin we do not see the severe cases now, so that a description of them would not be of any use in a book of this character.
Antitoxin is absolutely harmless when given to a patient who has no diphtheria.
This is essential, because the efficacy of antitoxin is greatest when given early in the disease.
So important are these conditions that it is the proper treatment to giveantitoxin at once in every case of tonsilitis that in the slightest way resembles diphtheria.
The antitoxin has been found, and is applied successfully.
But more than that it has been the place where Roux, a fellow worker with Pasteur, discovered the antitoxinfor diphtheria which has resulted in the saving of thousands of human lives.
The serum of the blood of these horses is then used to inoculate the patient suffering from or exposed to diphtheria, and thus the disease is checked or prevented altogether by the antitoxin injected into the blood.
When antitoxinwas used on the first day of the disease no deaths took place.
Illustration: Antitoxin for diphtheria prepared by the New York Board of Health.
It is therefore advisable, in a suspected case of diphtheria, to have antitoxinused at once to prevent serious results.
The laboratories of the board of health prepare this antitoxin and supply it fresh for public use.
Immunity may be acquired by means of such treatment as the antitoxin treatment for diphtheria.
It is probable that the ultimate source of the antitoxin is to be found in the living cells of the tissues and that it passes from them into the blood.
An antitoxin exerts its effects by actual combination with the respective toxin, the combination being inert.
For a great many years, scientists have labored without success to find an antitoxin for consumption, and within the last year extensive experiments have been made in the American army on the use of antitoxin for typhoid fever.
It is equally useful with vaccine as a preventative of disease, and in a school, for instance, where diphtheria has broken out, it is only a reasonable precaution to use antitoxin freely to prevent infection of those exposed to the disease.
To make use of theantitoxin at the proper stage of the disease, early recognition is important, and fortunately science here can be of great service.
This special prevalence of the disease is so well recognized that health officers usually lay in a large stock of antitoxin about the first of July, awaiting the inevitable demand for it.
The mother and two children were sick with diphtheria in its worst form, and the father refused to allow the doctor to administer the antitoxin even to those sick, much less to those who had been, up to that time, only exposed.
If the disease is early recognized and a proper amount of antitoxin injected, that is, forced in under the skin so that it may be absorbed by the blood, the probability is that in all cases the patient will recover.
This artificial immunity may also be obtained in the course of events by having the disease as a child, thereby generating the antitoxin in one's own body instead of in the body of some cow or horse or rabbit.
The fourth disease for which an antidote in the form of antitoxin has been developed is tetanus, commonly known as lockjaw.
Here it is difficult to remove the cause, but many cases can be cured and almost all are alleviated be means of a special antitoxin applied locally.
The treatment must be both general with antitoxin and local with antiseptics.
After the first treatment with antitoxin she seemed to rally, her throat cleared up, but I soon found that the poison had pervaded her entire system, and so I stayed with her day and night.
Prophylactic injection of tetanus antitoxin may be indicated.
Laboratory research goes on constantly, and doubtless many more substances will eventually be discovered that will reduce human misery as vaccines and antitoxin have already reduced it.
Death rates from diphtheria and typhoid fever have been greatly reduced by the use of antitoxin and antityphoid vaccine.
Clinical tests show that the blood contains sufficient antitoxin (diphtheria) to afford protection.
When this antitoxinis injected into the blood, it will cure diphtheria.
Tetanus antitoxinshould be given (5000 units), and repeated in twenty-four hours if no improvement is seen.
In all suspicious cases, a prophylatic injection of tetanus antitoxin is to be recommended (1000 units).
Finally, the counteracting effect of antitoxin in preventing the disintegrating action of the diphtheritic toxin on the nervous tissues has been demonstrated pathologically.
They cannot be acquainted with the evidence, for if the efficacy of antitoxin in the treatment of diphtheria has not been proved, then neither can the efficacy of any treatment for anything be said to be proved.
Since the antitoxin treatment was introduced in 1894 it has overshadowed all other methods.
Since then an enormous mass of facts has accumulated from all quarters of the globe, all testifying to the value of antitoxin in the treatment of diphtheria.
One physician may challenge another's faults, ridicule his remedies, call his antitoxin dangerous poison, but their common profession he proudly styles "the most exalted form of altruism.
Large cities should have their own pasteurizing plants, just as many cities now have their own vaccine farms and antitoxin laboratories.
We had had our experiences with handling iodine and antitoxin and dressings, but this artillery captain was in need of none of these.
While diphtheria antitoxin is harmless to the diphtheria patient, the serum of the pollen-immunized horse nearly killed the first patient Dunbar tried it on, who happened to be his assistant, a sufferer from hay fever.
He attempted to duplicate in hay fever the triumph of antitoxin in diphtheria by injecting a horse with increasing doses of pollen until the horse became immune to large doses of pollen and his blood full of antibodies.
The widespread use of antitoxin in diphtheria gave abundant opportunity to study the phenomena of sensitizing a human being with one dose and killing him with another dose of the same thing.
In some cases the reaction is so prompt and so vigorous that the antitoxin is produced almost without any discomfort, or disturbance, and the patient scarcely knows anything about it.
A guinea pig is such a tiny animal that the amount of antitoxin which it could form would be far too small to cure a man, or even a child.
Nearly the same thing might be said of antitoxin for diphtheria.
This artificially prepared antitoxin is injected into the blood of, say, a diphtheria patient, and the poison is at once neutralised, instead of leaving the patient to make his own antitoxin and letting him perhaps fail in the effort.
The antitoxin produced in the contest of the body cells against some diseases will not only neutralise the toxin of a particular disease, but it will also neutralise the toxin of a second disease.
The membrane often will disappear in twenty-four hours where antitoxin has been used, and the child will be playing about the floor.
Clergymen seem to consider it necessary for them to have their minds made up as to whether the use of diphtheria antitoxinis advisable or not.
The bacillus remains after the use of antitoxin just as if antitoxin had not been used.
His body cells make an antitoxin which neutralises the toxin or virus of cowpox, he recovers from this light disease, and the antitoxin now remaining in his body prevents for years another successful inoculation with cowpox.
If you find a physician opposed to the use of antitoxin this simply means that he is a quack.
One serious disadvantage in the use of antitoxin is that it leaves the dangerous bacillus in the throat of the patient about as long as an unaided convalescence would leave it.
If they have once committed themselves to the expression of the opinion that antitoxin is of no value, then no amount of evidence will succeed in changing their opinion.
As to the use of antitoxin as a preventive and cure for diphtheria, too much praise cannot be given to that wonderful discovery.
A physician is called at once, and, not only to the child, but to the other members of the family, antitoxin is immediately administered.
The early use of antitoxin greatly lessens all these serious complications.
That gentleman had telegraphed for antitoxin, and said it was important that he should have it; therefore, antitoxin must be sent in spite of time-tables and forgetful butlers.
If I could administer antitoxin by to-morrow noon the patient might recover.
It directs him to send the antitoxin by the early train.
Who are the merciful people--the few physicians who superintend the making of the antitoxin and make sure of its quality, or the people who cry out against the infliction of any suffering on animals on behalf of mankind?
