Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 69.djvu/245

Rh of the difficulties of the method. The same difficulty has been encountered in the practical carrying out of this method of immunization in cattle. Several series of guinea-pigs were inoculated with tubercle bacilli as follows: (a) with dead bacilli, (b) with living bacilli from cold-blooded animals, (c) with a culture of human bacilli cultivated artificially for more than twenty years which produces on inoculation no appreciable local lesions and never tends to generalize, and (d) another human culture cultivated artificially for more than fourteen years, which still causes in all the pigs slightly enlarged inguinal glands near the site of inoculation, and occasionally brings about slight caseation of the nodes with a tendency to partial generalization of the virus. The dead bacilli and the bacilli from cold-blooded species gave no protection; the second human culture, by reason of its greater invasive properties, protects better than the first, which is almost devoid of power to grow in the animal body. In no case, however, was the growth of the virulent bacilli wholly suppressed.

In man the question of acquired immunity has been answered by many authorities, as far as the main considerations go, in the negative. A large number of well-observed facts demonstrates that a person who has suffered from localized tuberculosis of the lymph glands—scrofula so-called—or other form of local tuberculosis, can not count upon an immunity from pulmonary tuberculosis. And yet it can, I think, be shown by reference to statistics that in man there exists a refractory condition which becomes increased after infection, since the number of persons who have been the victims, at some period of their life, of a tuberculous infection, is very large in comparison with the number who die of this disease, or the even larger number who develop severe forms of it. Hirsch gives the mortality of tuberculosis as compared with deaths from all other causes as 3:22, in other words, tuberculosis claims as victims of death 1 in every 7 persons. This proportion does not, however, express the morbidity from tuberculosis, which is. in reality, far greater than these figures indicate. It is difficult to secure by vital statistics reliable data of the incidence of tuberculosis; but trustworthy observations made at autopsies upon human beings indicate that as many as 90 per cent, of persons, dying from all causes, have at some period of their life been the victims of a tubercular infection. In far the greater number of instances the disease remains fixed in the bronchial or other lymphatic glands or the apex of the lungs and exerts no injurious effect upon the organism as a whole. We may, therefore, fairly conclude that the human organism possesses a strong inherent tendency to overcome infection with the tubercle bacillus. So much can be safely predicated. But whether the suppression of a local infection, such as I have described, gives an increased capacity for overcoming subsequently invading tubercle bacilli remains for the present an open