Serum Therapy
2 of the 6 encyclopedias on this shelf carry an entry for Serum Therapy. Both are reproduced below, so you can see where they agree and where they differ.
Collier's New Encyclopedia (1921)
the practice of treating diseases by injecting into the blood, fluid obtained from animals previously rendered immune against these diseases. This system of treatment is based upon the theory that bacteria produce disease by the formation in the blood, of poisonous bodies known as toxins. The blood of a healthy animal has the power of combating the effect of these toxins by the production of other bodies known as antitoxins. These antitoxins not only check the course of the disease, but to a large extent render the person who has suffered from any particular disease immune against subsequent attacks. The object of serum therapy is to produce an artificial resistance to disease by introducing into the blood antitoxins from an outside source. The most successful application of the theory has been in the treatment of diphtheria, and a description of the method of preparing the serum used in this disease may be taken as an example. A culture of the bacillus which causes diphtheria is made in broth, and the toxin is thereby produced. The bacilli are then killed by a weak antiseptic solution and removed by filtration. The filtrate contains the toxins in solution, and small doses are injected into the blood of a healthy horse. More and more doses are injected at intervals, in ever-increasing quantities. The blood of the horse combats the poison by producing antitoxins, and the serum is tested, from time to time, by injecting into guinea-pigs, previously inoculated with diphtheria bacilli. When the serum has reached the required strength, the horse is bled, the serum is separated from the blood, treated with a preservative and measured into standard doses. By introducing this serum into the blood of persons suffering from diphtheria the resistance to the disease is greatly increased. Several attempts to cure other diseases by the use of serums have met with failure. For instance, serums for the treatment of pneumonia, scarlet fever, rheumatism, dysentery, cholera, and anthrax have met with little or no success. On the other hand, tetanus, meningitis, plague and snake poisons have all been successfully treated by this method. An antitoxin for the cure of hay fever has been used with partial success. It is prepared from animals which have become immune against the effect of pollen from plants or grasses. It is found, however, that there are so many varieties of pollen that no animal can be immune against all of them. In consequence, the serums are frequently found useless owing to the fact that the sufferer from the disease may come into contact with pollen different from that encountered by the animal from which the serum was prepared. Another use of serum is in the control of persistent bleeding, the normal serum of the horse being found valuable for this purpose. Convalescent serums, prepared from the blood of convalescents from various fevers, are also used.
Aiton's Encyclopedia (1910)
a mode of treatment of certain diseases by injection of modified blood serum of man or some other animal. There are, it may be said, two purposes and, hence, two branches of the subject. The first purpose is to render the person immune, that is to say, proof against attack; the second is to destroy the bacterium or other organism and counteract the toxin, the poison, produced by it. Dr. Jenner's vaccination against smallpox and Pasteur's treatment of rabies may be cited as examples of treatment designed to produce immunity. It is believed that progress has been made in preventing anthrax, cholera, plague, typhoid, and tuberculosis. In the second branch of serum therapy the design is to cure a disease already well seated. The most positive results have been secured in the treatment of diphtheria. Physicians now rely almost wholly on the injection of anti-toxin. This anti-toxin is developed in the body of a horse, that is to say, the serum of a horse inoculated by a physician is injected in the circulatory system of the patient where it sets up an action that counteracts the toxin or poison of the diphtheritic bacteria that swarm in the blood of the patient. Students of serum therapy claim that progress has been made in the cure of lockjaw, dysentery, pneumonia, and blood-poisoning. See Vaccination ; Cholera ; Typhoid ; Diphtheria , etc.
What Has Changed in the Last Century
Both accounts describe an era when injected animal serum was medicine's sharpest weapon against bacterial infection; that era ended with the sulfa drugs of the 1930s and penicillin in the 1940s, which treated the pneumonia, plague, meningitis and blood-poisoning that Collier's listed in 1921. Vaccination did the rest: Ramon's diphtheria toxoid, introduced in the 1920s, made the disease so rare in vaccinated countries that horse antitoxin is now a stockpiled rarity rather than routine, and tetanus is treated with human immune globulin instead of horse serum. Antivenom for snakebite is the one use that survives essentially as described, still made by hyperimmunising horses and bleeding them. The hay-fever treatment Aiton's and Collier's puzzled over was on the wrong track: modern allergy shots inject small doses of the pollen itself into the patient, a technique Leonard Noon had published in 1911, and the antibody principle now reaches patients as laboratory-made monoclonal antibodies rather than animal blood.
Written for this edition, 2026.