chiefly to stimulate the body to react against its invading hosts.  They are, as a rule, not specific against definite diseases.  We can not hope for much in the way of discovering special medicines adapted to special diseases.  We must simply look upon them as means which the physician has in hand for stimulating the natural forces of the body, and these may doubtless vary with different individual natures.  Recognising this, we can see also the logic of the small dose as compared to the large dose.  A small dose of a drug may serve as a stimulant for the lagging forces, while a larger dose would directly repress them or produce injurious secondary effects.  As soon as we recognise that the aim of medicine is not to destroy the disease but rather to stimulate the resisting forces of the body, the whole logic of therapeutics assumes a new aspect.

Physicians have understood this, and, especially in recent years, have guided their practice by it.  If a moderate dose of quinine will check malaria in a few days, it does not follow that twice the dose will do it in half the time or with twice the certainty.  The larger doses of the past, intended to drive out the disease, have been everywhere replaced by smaller doses designed to stimulate the lagging body powers.  The modern physician makes no attempt to cure typhoid fever, having long since learned his inability to do this, at least if the fever once gets a foothold; but he turns his attention to every conceivable means of increasing the body’s strength to resist the typhoid poison, confident that if he can thus enable the patient to resist the poisoning effects of the typhotoxine his patient will in the end react against the disease and drive off the invading bacteria.  The physician’s duty is to watch and guard, but he must depend upon the vital powers of his patient to carry on alone the actual battle with the bacterial invaders.

Antitoxines.

In very recent times, however, our bacteriologists have been pointing out to the world certain entirely new means of assisting the body to fight its battles with bacterial diseases.  As already noticed, one of the primal forces in the recovery, from some diseases, at least, is the development in the body of a substance which acts as an antidote to the bacterial poison.  So long as this antitoxine is not present the poisons produced by the disease will have their full effect to weaken the body and prevent the revival of its resisting powers to drive off the bacteria.  Plainly, if it is possible to obtain this antitoxine in quantity and then inoculate it into the body when the toxic poisons are present, we have a means for decidedly assisting the body in its efforts to drive off the parasites.  Such an antidote to the bacterial poison would not, indeed, produce a cure, but it would perhaps have the effect of annulling the action of the poisons, and would thus give the body a much greater chance to master the bacteria.  It is upon this principle that is based the use of antitoxines in diphtheria and tetanus