Middlebury register. (Middlebury, Vt.) 1886-1937, 1895-02-15
ANTI-TOXINE.
SOME HlNo ABOUT THE PREPARATION
AND USE OF The NEW REMEDY.
From Merck's Market Report.

ratlve powers OF the anti-diphtheritiC
serum belongs to Prof. Behrlng, who, in
turn, emphatically declares that without
Loeiller's discovery of the diphtheria
bacili and of the nature of the diphthe-
ria virus the anti-diphtheltic serum
would not have been discovered
The earliest published cases OF diph-
liberia treated by the serum we're a series
of 30 reported on by Behring and Kossel,
in April, 1893. For various reasons
(among them the difficulty of obtaining
the serun) it was some time before
Behring's example was followed by
other physicians. just one year later.
in April of 1894, EhrlIch, Kossel and
Wasserman reported their experience IN
220 unsolicited cases treated by hypodeI-
mic injections of the serum of goats i'm
munized against diphtheria. Among the
l53 cases in which it was not necessary
to perform tracheotomy, the mortality
was 1916 per cent. In six of the patients
treated on the first day of the disease
there was no death, and in GO in which
the treatment was Instituted on the
second day, the mortality was 3 per
cent; whilst in % treated on the fourth
day of the disease, the mortality was
1875 per cent Next came Katz, who re-
ported ON lbs cases treated from March
to June of 1894, with mortality of ID 2
per cents And then followed numerous
NJ oh xNnD
this country.
RouX undertook the preparation of
the antdiphtheritic serum only after he
had become acquainted with the reports
OF Loetler and Behring.
The first step IN the practical appllca
ton of the. process given in outline
above is the preparation of the diph
liberia toXiue from civilizations of the
specific bacillus of the disease. Flask.
containing nutrient broth are inoculateC
with the bacili and maintained for sev
eral weeks at temperature of 81 de
grees c. At the expiration of this peri
cd of incubation the contents of the
TASKS are filtered through Chamber
land filter, which arrests the bacilh
The clear tiltrate thus freed from organ
ism has a strong alkaline reaction. 1t i,
a virulent poison and speedily causes
death when injected into animals in com
paratively small quantities; from thi
property it is called diphtheritic toXine
The toXine IS injected into animals il
minute but increasing quantities at in
terVals extending over some months. th
initial dose being so small as to caus
only transient symptoms, aud 1t is fOunC
that animals so treated are finally en-
abed to withstand the injection of sucl
doses as would prove rapidly fatal TO al
uninoculated animal of the same weight
When tie animal has been thus rendered
immune, its milk and blood serum ar,
stated to possess the remarkable prop
erty of protecting other animals from
incubation by the disease.
InsOrder to obtain the serum, blood i
withdrawnsfrom the body and allowed
to stand. 1t clots in a short time. tn
eliot being composed of filaments o
fibrin nclosng the blood corpuscles
and by the contraction of the clot tn
blood is separated into clOt and serum
the latter being a pale. clear fluid com
prising practically the fluid part o
blood, minus corpuscles and fbrin. Tn
serum obtained in this way from IN
blood off animals rendered immune, a
previously described, constitutes tn
"antl-toXine" used in the treatment o
, the disease, the name beng derive
from its antagOnistic action to tb
"toxine' produced by the bacillus.
may be well to state here that nothing
is known at present as to the nature O
the substance to which the action of tn
tOXine and anti-toXine is due. Frot
experiments on animals, the follOwin
results were obtained: o. BY mixing
the antl-toXine in certain proportion
with the toXine in test tube, the latte
is rendered harmless; (2) by first inject
ing the antitoXine, followed by tn
toNine. the same effect is produced, an
CD the toXine may be Injected first. fol
lowed by the anti-tOXine; in this case
relatively larger quantity of anti-toXin
is required, and the interval between tn
injections must he brief.
p The serum used in most of the case
reported was obtained from the horse
The animal is rendered immune by rt
peated injections over period of two o
three months, at the expiration of whic
its serum possesses very high anti-toXi
properties. The animal suffers in healt
but slightly, if at all, and the operatio
of bleeding may be repeated two O
three weeks after being first performed
Il is even said 10 be possible with thi
animal, rendered immune, as previCusl
described, to withdraw about kilo q
blood at once and to repeat this froI
time to time, without any deterioratio
of the anti-tOXlne obtained or danger t
the animal, provided the injections G