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Show NEW CURE' FOR DIPHTHERIA. . Europcin Hospitals Practicing a Method of Blood Inoculation So many thousands of children are annually carried off by diphtheria, the sufferings caused by tho disease are so agonizing and the remedies hitherto at the disposal of the medical profession so inadequate that the news of the introduction intro-duction into the Berlin and London hospitals hos-pitals of a new and efficacious cure for this fell malady -cannot be regarded otherwise than as a matter cf public interest. in-terest. Very little has been heard about this' remedy, owing to the fact that the distinguished dis-tinguished bacteriologists engaged in Its discovery have been unwilling to subject themselves to the same disadvantage disad-vantage as Dr. Koch, whose cure for consumption has been unjustly proclaimed pro-claimed a failure merely because it was published to the world prematurely and before it was ready fo? medical application. ap-plication. The new cure, briefly speaking, speak-ing, is ono of inoculation, with this difference that, instead of injecting the poison into the system of the patient, pa-tient, one injects the blood of an animal ani-mal which h:is been inoculated with a weak culture of the diphtheria bacte ria, the virus of the latter being, how ever, of so weak a character that it does not affect the animal with the malady, but merely renders it immune thereto. Repeated experiments made of late have shown that a few drops of blood from a horse or any other animal thus rendered immune injected into a human hu-man being suffering from diphtheria are sufficient to arrest and cure the disease. dis-ease. Of course it is too soon as yet to quote the statistics of the few hundreds of cures which have been effected in Berlin and London by this treatment, which is to be fully discussed in all its complicated scientific aspects at the forthcoming international congress of hygiene in September at Budapest. But, whatever the ultimate result of its application, ap-plication, it has at least one advantage over all other forms of inoculation hitherto hith-erto discovered namely, that the matter injected into the system of the patient is free from poison and consequently harmless. New York Tribune. |
