On re-injection with B. tuberculosis or its products and with sera

Abstract

We have stated in several papers read before this Society that extreme vaso-depression was caused by the intravenous injection of split products of bacterial and other origin. These statements were part of an endeavor to elucidate experimentally the mechanism by which foreign organisms and substances may possibly cause intoxication, infection and anaphylaxis by neutralizing pressor secretions, by removing or using up the nourishment of the host, or by destroying the processes upon which depend the host's specificity, vaso-energy and power of reforming foreign bodies into substances like its own constituents, which may be essential in these conditions to its existence.

This view includes the action of those foreign substances and ferments upon the host, by which the host organism or substrata gives off split products which thus produce an auto-intoxication.

These notes carry this view still further by means of a few observations on death and symptoms following re-injection in animals which have already been injected with tubercle bacilli or products of the tubercle bacilli and with sera. An explanation is advanced that the death which followed the re-injection of the minute dose of B. tuberculosis, with the long interval between the first and second injection, namely twelve months, is probably due to a deferred anaphylaxis or persistent increased susceptibility or sensitiveness which may be present for an unusually long time in some of the cases which have apparently recovered from the first injection. There were not enough tuberculous lesions found in this case to satisfactorily account for death.

The initial dose according to this interpretation produces a state of responsiveness or sensitiveness which reacts to the attack or action of the re-injection, by the production of free-bonded substances and split products, poisonous secretions or eliminations which result in the intoxication or functional disturbance which may end in death.