Beacon Lights of History, Volume 14: The New Era — Rudolf Virchow, Part 2

In case the attack is not successfully repelled at the outset, what happens?

There begins a struggle between the invaders and what may be called the reserves of the organism, consisting of the white blood corpuscles, which undergo a great augmentation in number.

These corpuscles are endowed with the faculty of amoeboid movement; that is to say, they may shoot out projections from their substance, and even convert themselves for the time being into traps, seizing upon the pathogenic bacteria, incarcerating them within their own mass, and carrying them away to be thrust out of the system by organs whose function it is to eliminate extraneous matter.

These corpuscles are, indeed, said figuratively to _eat_ the malign micro-organisms, whence they have been termed phagocytes (from [Greek: phagein], to eat, and [Greek: kutos], a cell); also because they carry away refuse and noxious material, they have been called "the scavengers of the system."

By means of their amoeboid movement they are enabled to worm themselves through inconceivably minute apertures in the blood vessels, and attack and devour peccant matter wherever it may have effected a lodgment.

These white corpuscles are also known as leucocytes, and their increase in number when they are called upon to resist bacterial invasion is spoken of as hyperleucocytosis.

The discovery of their protective function is to be credited to Metchnikoff, a Russian physician now teaching in Paris.

When they migrate from the blood vessels in great numbers they finally, after having fulfilled their office as phagocytes, degenerate into the corpuscular elements of pus, which is the creamy liquid contained in an abscess.

Their migratory power was discovered by Cohnheim.

But as a general thing the phagocytes do not succeed in making away with all the pathogenic germs, or even with enough of them to prevent the illness which they tend to produce.

The further combat is between the poisonous products, termed toxines, engendered by the bacteria and certain antidotal substances, called antitoxines, newly created in the watery portion of the blood by some wonderful provision of Nature that is not yet well understood.

Each infective disease has its special toxine, and for the destruction of each the blood prepares its particular antitoxine; possibly, however, some of the antitoxines may be efficacious against more than one kind of toxine, for there are physicians who are convinced that vaccination is a temporary preventive of whooping-cough.

But the elaboration of an antitoxine takes time, and the result in any given case, whether in recovery or in death, seems to be settled by the ability or inability of the vital powers of the individual to hold out until they are relieved by the evolution of the necessary amount of antitoxine.

In the long run, provided the sick person survives, more antitoxine is generated than is required to save life.

The excess remains in the system for a greater or lesser length of time, and this fact explains the individual's subsequent immunity to the disease from which he has recovered; any fresh invading force of the microbes of that disease finds that defensive preparations have been made in advance.

In the case of some diseases this acquired immunity is usually lifelong, as in that of small-pox; in others, of which influenza is a notable example, it is as a rule very transitory; and there are all gradations between the two.

It is thought that this acquired immunity to some diseases may be transmitted to the offspring, for it is quite certain that there are many people who are from birth insusceptible to scarlet fever, no matter what may be the extent of their exposure to that disease.

The recognition of Nature's elaboration of protective antitoxines has led to their artificial cultivation in the lower animals, and, thus produced, they have been used with brilliant results in the prevention and cure of at least one formidable disease, diphtheria.

The immense reduction of the mortality from this disease that has followed the introduction of the treatment with the artificial antitoxine we owe to Behring, of Germany, and Roux, of France.

Omitting unnecessary details, we may describe the process of obtaining diphtheria antitoxine as follows: A certain amount of diphtheritic poison (of the bacteriological sort, prepared by cultivating the diphtheria microbe) is injected into the circulation of a horse--sufficient to make the horse sick, but not enough to endanger his life.

The horse's system straightway begins to elaborate the protective antitoxine, and there results from this one injection a sufficient amount of it to save the horse, although far too little to make the serum of his blood potent enough for medicinal use.

Hence, after the lapse of a suitable interval, he is again injected with diphtheritic poison, and for the second time his blood begins to generate the antitoxine.

And the process is repeated again and again, the virulence of the poison being increased each time, until the horse's blood is fairly reeking with antitoxine.

Then blood is drawn freely from the horse, and it is allowed to separate into clot and serum, the latter alone being the part destined for use.

This serum is tested on a small animal that has been inoculated with a deadly dose of the diphtheritic poison; if it saves the little creature from death, it is assumed to be potent enough for use on human beings, and, handled with all possible precautions against putrefaction or any contamination with pathogenic bacteria, it is furnished to physicians, its degree of potency being designated in "units."

If in this brief article, which does not purport to be more than a sketch of the tremendous strides made by medicine in the Nineteenth Century, so much space has been given to the germ theory of disease, it is because the demonstration of the truth of that theory has been absolute, and has constituted the very marrow of almost all the medical progress of the century that has been the outcome of continuous thought and study as opposed to chance discovery.

Such results as the germ theory has now led to in the treatment of diphtheria it had already accomplished in the field of surgery as a consequence of that strict asepticism which, originating with Joseph Lister (now Lord Lister), and rapidly carried by him to a condition verging on technical completeness, was soon taken up by surgeons all over the world and brought wellnigh to perfection, so that the mortality of wounds of all sorts has been tremendously reduced, and many surgical operations are now practised frequently--indeed, whenever the occasion for them arises--that before the days of Listerism would have been looked upon as almost tantamount to the patient's death-warrant.

More particularly is this the case as to operations which involve opening into the abdomen, the chest, or the cranium.

So little risk now attaches to such operations, properly performed, that the opening of the abdominal cavity for the mere purpose of ascertaining the condition of its contents--"exploratory laparotomy," as it is called--is a matter of constant occurrence.

Curiously enough, in some way not yet satisfactorily explained, that procedure in itself, without anything further being done, has in many instances resulted in decided amelioration of a morbid condition, if not in its cure.

A striking example of this is seen in the benefit that often results in cases of one form of "consumption of the bowels," namely, tuberculous disease of the membrane that lines the abdominal wall and invests the abdominal organs.

This is not the only operation that does good mysteriously; that of cutting out a bit of the iris in a form of deep-seated eye disease, glaucoma, that tends toward complete blindness, is hardly more explicable; neither is an incision of the capsule of the kidney for certain forms of Bright's disease, each of which stays the progress of the trouble in a goodly proportion of instances.

Another of the great divisions of the healing art, that of midwifery, has been enhanced quite as much as general surgery by the employment of Listerism.

The process of childbirth, although a perfectly natural one, almost necessarily carries with it a certain amount of laceration, and, through the wound surfaces thus produced, absorption of poisonous material was formerly so frequent that puerperal fever figured prominently in mortality reports.

It was Oliver Wendell Holmes--a graduate in medicine and a professor in the Harvard Medical School, though we are accustomed to think of him only as a delightful writer--who first declared that puerperal fever was the product of infection from without the body, and Semmelweis demonstrated the truth of the proposition.

Holmes was a teacher of physiology, and his study of that branch of medical science was in itself enough to convince him of the doctrine which he inculcated.

Listerism must be credited, not only with having added immensely to the safety of the major operations of surgery, but also with having led to great improvement of their technics by reason of the greatly increased frequency with which it has come to be thought justifiable to practise them; what we do again and again we are apt in the end to do well, whereas that which we turn to only in despair and as rarely as possible, we do clumsily and imperfectly.

Listerism has been unjustly alleged by a few to be unworthy of the appreciation in which it is held by the great majority of medical men of all countries; simple cleanliness, it has been urged, is quite as efficient as the full Listerian precautions.

This is begging the question, for simple cleanliness, "chemical cleanliness," is all that Listerism purports to accomplish.

The use of antiseptics has been decried in the interest of asepticism, as if the whole purpose of antisepticism were not to secure asepsis.

Lord Lister is entitled to the full credit of establishing the aseptic surgery of the present day, in spite of the facts that his doctrine followed rather than preceded his early improvements, that aseptic procedures have been brought nearer perfection elsewhere than in his own country, and that the whole system rests on foundations laid by Pasteur.

While it is quite true that to the Listerian theory and practice are almost wholly to be ascribed the favorable results of the major surgery of the present day, we must not forget the immeasurable benefits to the diseased, the injured, and the crippled that have arisen from patient efforts and occasional brilliant intuition that have had no connection with the germ theory of infection.

Take the case of a broken leg, for example, an injury that formerly condemned the victim to weeks and weeks of confinement to bed, together with the suffering and danger almost inseparable from the old methods of the long straight splint and tight bandaging.

At the present time he who has met with such a misfortune is commonly able to be about on crutches within a few days, and his broken bone mends while he is cultivating his appetite and indulging in pleasant intercourse with his fellow-men.

This great change has been made possible by one device after another, invented by different men.

Josiah Crosby introduced the use of sticking-plaster for extension, instead of the chafing bands previously employed; Gurdon Buck substituted elastic extension by means of a weight and pulley for the rude and arbitrary traction in vogue before; James L. Little devised the plaster-of-Paris splint, whereby broken bones were immobilized with hardly appreciable discomfort; and Henry B. Sands established the safety and practicability of applying the plaster-of-Paris splint almost immediately after the reduction ("setting") of the fracture.

In the meantime Nathan R. Smith and John T. Hodgen had demonstrated the advantages of suspending a fractured limb from above.

All these men were Americans; surely our country has contributed powerfully to the well-being of the subjects of fracture.

Other Americans, notably Lewis A.

Sayre, have enabled sufferers with joint disease, including the dreaded hip disease, to run about and gain health and strength, instead of languishing in bed.

Sayre, too, by his suspension treatment and the plaster-of-Paris jacket, set the hunchback on his feet at a stage in his disease in which before he had been forced to prolonged and painful recumbency.

Although men professing special skill in certain operations, and doubtless possessing it, flourished in old times, and left more or less of their impress on the surgery of the present day, for that matter, it was not until the second half of the Nineteenth Century that regional surgery (which is what specialism virtually amounts to) was systematically cultivated.

Now there is hardly a portion of the body to which practitioners who make its ailments a specialty do not direct their searching methods of examination or on which they do not practise their ingenious devices in the way of treatment.

Specialism has always been decried by a large section of the medical profession.

On the other hand, it has been and is still overrated by the laity.

The true estimate lies between the two.

The specialists have advanced surgery immensely, but, with many honorable exceptions, they have laid too much stress on their several specialties, making too wide a range of ailments fall within them.

As for the community at large, their shortcoming lies in the fact that most of them would seek for a specialist in mumps in case that painful but transitory infliction were to come upon them, and in their underrating of the family physician.

To change for a moment to a topic akin to the germ theory of disease, the reader may be reminded that the antitoxine treatment of infectious disease involves in almost every instance the use of some product contained in the serum (that is to say, the watery part of the blood).

This leads to the subject of the use of natural and artificial serum in the treatment of disease.

To quote again from the article entitled, "The Nineteenth Century in Medicine" ("New York Medical Journal," Dec.

29,1900): "It has been observed that the normal serum of certain animals that are insusceptible to particular infectious diseases, if injected into the human blood current or even into the subcutaneous tissue, confers more or less of immunity against those diseases....

Artificial serum seems to have been first employed by Edmund R. Peaslee as a benign application to the peritonaeum in the operation of ovariotomy.

His conception of its mode of action is not very clear, but he was a very successful ovariotomist, and we can only conjecture that he builded better than he knew, like many another man.

A few years ago much was expected from transfusion of blood, but gradually the conviction has forced itself upon us that it is wellnigh useless, and indeed that, on the whole, it is worse than useless.

It has virtually been abandoned....

But experiments in transfusion have not been fruitless; they have culminated in demonstrating the inestimable value of infusions of 'normal,' or 'physiological,' solutions of sodium chloride, and not only of infusions, but also of peritoneal irrigation with such solutions.

Many a life has been saved by resorting to this measure, even in apparently desperate cases."

Within about a decade of the close of the century, Robert Koch, whose discoveries and ingenious studies in bacteriology had brought him world-wide renown, announced that he had produced a derivative of the tubercle bacillus, which he termed tuberculin, that he thought might prove curative of tuberculous disease.

It was to be injected beneath the skin.

If the subject was really tuberculous, he would "react" by manifesting a certain degree of fever, and repeated injections would bring about elimination of the tuberculous deposits and thus effect a cure.

The world was carried away with such an announcement coming from such a man, and it was thoroughly believed that at last "the great white plague," consumption, was to be conquered.

Tuberculin did, indeed, cure certain minor forms of tuberculous disease, such as the skin affection known as lupus, but it soon became evident that it was almost impotent in the treatment of pulmonary consumption.

It has, however, served to enable the veterinarian to make out the existence of tuberculous disease in cattle at an early stage of its course, and it is probable that by the slaughter of cattle thus found to be tuberculous much infection of human beings has been prevented.

Tuberculin failed of its prime purpose, but it does seem to have marked the initiative of a campaign against consumption which has already proved of incalculable benefit, and bids fair to put that omnipresent disease toward the foot of the list of causes of death.

We have made substantial advances in our knowledge of the disease, and we no longer regard it as incurable.

We have learned that it is communicable from one person to another, but also that its communication can easily be prevented, so that there is no reason to shrink from association with tuberculous persons.

We have learned, too, that consumption in one's progenitors, immediate or remote, hardly makes it even probable that he himself is doomed to suffer with it; the only tuberculous heredity that we now recognize is that of defective ability to withstand the infection, and even this we regard as in most instances readily surmountable.

We have learned, furthermore, that pulmonary tuberculous disease is by no means so fatal as it was formerly esteemed, for men whose business it is to make great numbers of post-mortem examinations, such as coroners' physicians and hospital pathologists, assure us that in a very large percentage of cases of death from other causes they find indubitable signs of past tuberculous disease of the lungs which had ceased its activity--been, in fact, cured, either spontaneously or by medical intervention.

Such intervention, it has been abundantly proved, is altogether likely to be successful if it is of the right sort and employed early.

There is, to be sure, no cure-all.

Powerful as the climatic treatment is, it must be supplemented by measures accurately adapted to the individual case, and failure to comprehend this fact still leads many a phthisical person to his grave.

But information is rapidly being diffused, sanatoria for such of the tuberculous as can take advantage of them are multiplying, and those who are shut off from their aid are growing more and more cognizant of how they should live in order to give themselves the best chance of recovery and save their associates from infection.

The era of consumption-cures--meaning drugs--is past; but the disease is cured in an ever-increasing proportion of instances, and that, too, by medical though not medicinal measures.