Vaccines Scorned

As soon as two Chicago physicians proved that doctors have found little use for vaccines to cure disease, the open-minded American Medical Association hastened, last fortnight, to publish the facts. Vaccines immunize against specific infection. For several years doctors, further, have believed that diligent experiment would show them a vaccine, serum, or antitoxin * to cure any particular disease. Many an agent was tried, and many a disappointment ensued. In Chicago Dr. Ludvig Hektoen and Ernest E. Irons wondered at the extent to which U. S. physicians are now using vaccines to cure disease, as against preventing disease. Accordingly they sent questionnaires to specialists and general practitioners in Michigan, Indianapolis, Manhattan and Brooklyn. Of 1,261 physicians reporting only 17 consider vaccine therapy generally useful and superior in treating infectious diseases. That is, in diseases already developed. For immunizing, for protecting against a disease there is very little question that vaccines are good. As immunizers they have guarded myriads of people against, for example, smallpox, typhoid, diphtheria.

* Vaccine (in the special sense) contains dead or weakened bacteria which stimulate the blood to kill active germs. Scrum is the fluid of immune blood obtained after coagulation. It contains antitoxins which counteract the poison produced by a specific bacterium. The three terms are often loosely used as equivalents.