A History of Science, vol 4, Henry Smith Williams [best books to read in life txt] 📗

different species differ widely in their

susceptibility to various maladies, and that the virus of a given

disease may become more and more virulent when passed through the

systems of successive individuals of one species, and,

contrariwise, less and less virulent when passed through the

systems of successive individuals of another species. These facts

suggested the theory that the blood of resistant animals might

contain something directly antagonistic to the virus, and the

hope that this something might be transferred with curative

effect to the blood of an infected susceptible animal. Numerous

experimenters all over the world made investigations along the

line of this alluring possibility, the leaders perhaps being Drs.

Behring and Kitasato, closely followed by Dr. Roux and his

associates of the Pasteur Institute of Paris. Definite results

were announced by Behring in 1892 regarding two important

diseases—tetanus and diphtheria—but the method did not come

into general notice until 1894, when Dr. Roux read an

epoch-making paper on the subject at the Congress of Hygiene at

Buda-Pesth.

 

In this paper Dr. Roux, after adverting to the labors of Behring,

Ehrlich, Boer, Kossel, and Wasserman, described in detail the

methods that had been developed at the Pasteur Institute for the

development of the curative serum, to which Behring had given the

since-familiar name antitoxine. The method consists, first, of

the cultivation, for some months, of the diphtheria bacillus

(called the Klebs-Loeffler bacillus, in honor of its discoverers)

in an artificial bouillon, for the development of a powerful

toxine capable of giving the disease in a virulent form.

 

This toxine, after certain details of mechanical treatment, is

injected in small but increasing doses into the system of an

animal, care being taken to graduate the amount so that the

animal does not succumb to the disease. After a certain course of

this treatment it is found that a portion of blood serum of the

animal so treated will act in a curative way if injected into the

blood of another animal, or a human patient, suffering with

diphtheria. In other words, according to theory, an antitoxine

has been developed in the system of the animal subjected to the

progressive inoculations of the diphtheria toxine. In Dr. Roux’s

experience the animal best suited for the purpose is the horse,

though almost any of the domesticated animals will serve the

purpose.

 

But Dr. Roux’s paper did not stop with the description of

laboratory methods. It told also of the practical application of

the serum to the treatment of numerous cases of diphtheria in the

hospitals of Paris—applications that had met with a gratifying

measure of success. He made it clear that a means had been found

of coping successfully with what had been one of the most

virulent and intractable of the diseases of childhood. Hence it

was not strange that his paper made a sensation in all circles,

medical and lay alike.

 

Physicians from all over the world flocked to Paris to learn the

details of the open secret, and within a few months the new

serum-therapy had an acknowledged standing with the medical

profession everywhere. What it had accomplished was regarded as

but an earnest of what the new method might accomplish presently

when applied to the other infectious diseases.

 

Efforts at such applications were immediately begun in numberless

directions—had, indeed, been under way in many a laboratory for

some years before. It is too early yet to speak of the results in

detail. But enough has been done to show that this method also is

susceptible of the widest generalization. It is not easy at the

present stage to sift that which is tentative from that which

will be permanent; but so great an authority as Behring does not

hesitate to affirm that today we possess, in addition to the

diphtheria antitoxine, equally specific antitoxines of tetanus,

cholera, typhus fever, pneumonia, and tuberculosis—a set of

diseases which in the aggregate account for a startling

proportion of the general death-rate. Then it is known that Dr.

Yersin, with the collaboration of his former colleagues of the

Pasteur Institute, has developed, and has used with success, an

antitoxine from the microbe of the plague which recently ravaged

China.

 

Dr. Calmette, another graduate of the Pasteur Institute, has

extended the range of the serum-therapy to include the prevention

and treatment of poisoning by venoms, and has developed an

antitoxine that has already given immunity from the lethal

effects of snake bites to thousands of persons in India and

Australia.

 

Just how much of present promise is tentative, just what are the

limits of the methods—these are questions for the future to

decide. But, in any event, there seems little question that the

serum treatment will stand as the culminating achievement in

therapeutics of our century. It is the logical outgrowth of those

experimental studies with the microscope begun by our

predecessors of the thirties, and it represents the present

culmination of the rigidly experimental method which has brought

medicine from a level of fanciful empiricism to the plane of a

rational experimental science.

 

IX. THE NEW SCIENCE OF EXPERIMENTAL PSYCHOLOGY

BRAIN AND MIND

A little over a hundred years ago a reform movement was afoot in

the world in the interests of the insane. As was fitting, the

movement showed itself first in America, where these unfortunates

were humanely cared for at a time when their treatment elsewhere

was worse than brutal; but England and France quickly fell into

line. The leader on this side of the water was the famous

Philadelphian, Dr. Benjamin Rush, “the Sydenham of America”; in

England, Dr. William Tuke inaugurated the movement; and in

France, Dr. Philippe Pinel, single-handed, led the way. Moved by

a common spirit, though acting quite independently, these men

raised a revolt against the traditional custom which, spurning

the insane as demon-haunted outcasts, had condemned these

unfortunates to dungeons, chains, and the lash. Hitherto few

people had thought it other than the natural course of events

that the “maniac” should be thrust into a dungeon, and perhaps

chained to the wall with the aid of an iron band riveted

permanently about his neck or waist. Many an unfortunate, thus

manacled, was held to the narrow limits of his chain for years

together in a cell to which full daylight never penetrated;

sometimes—iron being expensive—the chain was so short that the

wretched victim could not rise to the upright posture or even

shift his position upon his squalid pallet of straw.

 

In America, indeed, there being no Middle Age precedents to

crystallize into established customs, the treatment accorded the

insane had seldom or never sunk to this level. Partly for this

reason, perhaps, the work of Dr. Rush at the Philadelphia

Hospital, in 1784, by means of which the insane came to be

humanely treated, even to the extent of banishing the lash, has

been but little noted, while the work of the European leaders,

though belonging to later decades, has been made famous. And

perhaps this is not as unjust as it seems, for the step which

Rush took, from relatively bad to good, was a far easier one to

take than the leap from atrocities to good treatment which the

European reformers were obliged to compass. In Paris, for

example, Pinel was obliged to ask permission of the authorities

even to make the attempt at liberating the insane from their

chains, and, notwithstanding his recognized position as a leader

of science, he gained but grudging assent, and was regarded as

being himself little better than a lunatic for making so

manifestly unwise and hopeless an attempt. Once the attempt had

been made, however, and carried to a successful issue, the

amelioration wrought in the condition of the insane was so patent

that the fame of Pinel’s work at the Bicetre and the Salpetriere

went abroad apace. It required, indeed, many years to complete it

in Paris, and a lifetime of effort on the part of Pinel’s pupil

Esquirol and others to extend the reform to the provinces; but

the epochal turning-point had been reached with Pinel’s labors of

the closing years of the eighteenth century.

 

The significance of this wise and humane reform, in the present

connection, is the fact that these studies of the insane gave

emphasis to the novel idea, which by-and-by became accepted as

beyond question, that “demoniacal possession” is in reality no

more than the outward expression of a diseased condition of the

brain. This realization made it clear, as never before, how

intimately the mind and the body are linked one to the other.

And so it chanced that, in striking the shackles from the insane,

Pinel and his confreres struck a blow also, unwittingly, at

time-honored philosophical traditions. The liberation of the

insane from their dungeons was an augury of the liberation of

psychology from the musty recesses of metaphysics. Hitherto

psychology, in so far as it existed at all, was but the

subjective study of individual minds; in future it must become

objective as well, taking into account also the relations which

the mind bears to the body, and in particular to the brain and

nervous system.

 

The necessity for this collocation was advocated quite as

earnestly, and even more directly, by another worker of this

period, whose studies were allied to those of alienists, and who,

even more actively than they, focalized his attention upon the

brain and its functions. This earliest of specialists in brain

studies was a German by birth but Parisian by adoption, Dr. Franz

Joseph Gall, originator of the since-notorious system of

phrenology. The merited disrepute into which this system has

fallen through the exposition of peripatetic charlatans should

not make us forget that Dr. Gall himself was apparently a highly

educated physician, a careful student of the brain and mind

according to the best light of his time, and, withal, an earnest

and honest believer in the validity of the system he had

originated. The system itself, taken as a whole, was hopelessly

faulty, yet it was not without its latent germ of truth, as later

studies were to show. How firmly its author himself believed in

it is evidenced by the paper which he contributed to the French

Academy of Sciences in 1808. The paper itself was referred to a

committee of which Pinel and Cuvier were members. The verdict of

this committee was adverse, and justly so; yet the system

condemned had at least one merit which its detractors failed to

realize. It popularized the conception that the brain is the

organ of mind. Moreover, by its insistence it rallied about it a

band of scientific supporters, chief of whom was Dr. Kaspar

Spurzlieim, a man of no mean abilities, who became the

propagandist of phrenology in England and in America. Of course

such advocacy and popularity stimulated opposition as well, and

out of the disputations thus arising there grew presently a

general interest in the brain as the organ of mind, quite aside

from any preconceptions whatever as to the doctrines of Gall and

Spurzheim.

 

Prominent among the unprejudiced class of workers who now

appeared was the brilliant young Frenchman Louis Antoine

Desmoulins, who studied first under the tutorage of the famous

Magendie, and published jointly with him a classical work on the

nervous system of vertebrates in 1825. Desmoulins made at least

one discovery of epochal importance. He observed that the brains

of persons dying in old age were lighter than the average and

gave visible evidence of atrophy, and he reasoned that such decay

is a normal accompaniment of senility. No one nowadays would

question the accuracy of this observation, but the scientific

world was not quite ready for it in 1825; for when Desmoulins

announced his discovery to the French Academy, that august and

somewhat patriarchal body was moved to quite unscientific wrath,

and forbade the young iconoclast the privilege of further

hearings. From which it is evident that the