Pine Bluff daily graphic., 1910-02-27

versailles thousands of physicians are carrying on the fight in behalf of the baby crop. Experiments on animals form the basis of all this advance, for since the discovery of anaesthe- tics and aseptic surgery results have been obtained which otherwise would have been impossible. Already many diseases have been conquered by this means which a generation ago were the terror of mothers.
 Just how results obtained along these lines have benefited the baby crop may be shown by concrete il
 lustration. Thirty years ago, accord
 ing to figures collected by the Census Bureau, diphtheria caused one death out of about every ninetenn that oc- cured. Mortality from this cause among children under five years was enormous and the disease ranked third as cause of death. More than 2S,O0O persons died of it in 1SS0 But in 1900, in spite of the greatly in creased population the deaths caused by diphtheria, according to the census figures, were only 1O,504, or about one-fifth of what they would have been on the 1880 basis. Out of more than 9,000,000 children under five years only about 5000, or one in 1900 tod Ac result diphtheria has now fallen from third to twentieth place as cause of death.
 Similar figures might be given of other diseases, such as small pox, meningitis, yellow fever and many others which once ravaged the baby crop but which now, as result of information gained by experiments on animals, are robbed of their terrors. It is stated on high Authority that the discovery of the diphtheria anti toxin has resulted in the annual sav- ing of 5000 lives in New York City alone. Proportionately for the whole country the annual saving of life is many times this number. Curiously enough while diphtheria has undoubt- edly existed for thousands of years. the chemical nature of the anti-toxin by which it is subdued is not known. We cannot tell except by tests on an imals whether given serum has much, little or no anti-toxin in it. The governments of the world, therefore, require that every producer shall test on animals the antitoxic strength of the serum sent out from his establish ment The antitoXin must not only be produced for us by animals, but must be tested upon them and with out such tests it's use could not be continued.
 While the experiments which led to the discovery of this anti-toxin were of course long and complicated, the history of it's achievement indi- cates the manner in which the study of the effect of various inoculations on animals has benefited the human race, particularly the child. Roux, at the Pasteur Institute in Paris, studied the nature of the diphtheria toxin and found that a very violent poison was given off from the bacilli growing in boullion. This can be filtered eff from the bacteria and has peculiar properties. Starting from earlier studies, Von Behring eXperf- mented upon the effect of injecting small but increasing doses of .sshis toxin into animals, and discovssed the remarkable facts that these animals become absolutely immune to the poi son and that their blood not only con- tains an antidote for the poison, but contains this antidote in such large amounts that little of the blood se- rum transferred to another animal will protect it from infection by the most virulent diphtheria bacilli When