Infection and immunity; a text-book of immunology and serology for students and practitioners

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1915 Excerpt: ...interference with the production of such bodies as are essential to phagocytosis. In this connection it is interesting to note that during pregnancy, which has long been recognized as a factor predisposing to the development of tuberculosis, the opsonic content of the blood tends to be abnormally low in fully 50 per cent. of the cases. Then, again, we can conceive that the normal bacteriolytic power of the blood may be impared by some of the influences in question. In the case of chronic alcoholism, this has indeed been demonstrated by Abbot and Bergey, who noted that there was a diminution of complement. That this in turn may actually diminish the resistance to certain infections has been shown by Pfeiffer and Moreschi. These investigators injected a series of guinea-pigs intraperitoneally with a fatal dose of cholera vibrios (equal for all animals) and an amount of cholera-immune serum sufficient to protect the animals against the number of organisms used. At the same time they received varying amounts of normal human serum and a constant quantity of an antihuman rabbit serum. The latter, of course, contained precipitins for the human albumins, and the idea of the experiment was that as a consequence of the interaction between precipitin and precipitinogen (albumin), and the resultant formation of a precipitate the compliment of the guinea-pig would be absorbed, and accordingly not available to activate the anticholera amboceptors, so that the animal would lose the protective influence of the latter which would have been operative had complement been available. The results were quite in accord with the theoretical demands, all those animals having died in which occasion for complement elimination was afforded, while the control animals which had received ...