Since our last issue Professor von Behring, of Marburg, the
inventor of the anti-toxin now largely used in diphtheria, has made an important announcement to the International Tuber- culosis Congress at Paris. The official statement is at once technical and condensed, but a lucid explanation is given by Dr. Saleeby in Tuesday's Daily Chronicle, which may be thus briefly summarised. Professor von Baring has discovered that the tubercle bacilli contain, besides poisonous and destructive substances, a substance which, uniting with the cells of the attacked organism, enables them to .resist the further poisonous action of the bacillus. These bacilli he treats in such a way as to extract from them all the poisonous elements while retaining the other substance, to which he gives the name T.C. ; and having injected them in this residual form into a variety of the lower mammals suffering from, or threatened by, tuberculosis, be has satisfied himself as to the efficacy of the treatment in securing immunity from the disease. The value of the cure in combating human phthisis thus depends on the acceptance of the proposition that tuberculosis is one and the same disease in all mammals, as opposed to the view of Dr. Koch that man cannot be infected from the ox. It would seem—in spite of statements in the Paris journals—that, pending clinical trials, Professor von Behring has told the public all be could possibly tell them for the moment, his antecedents and disinterested character negativing the supposition that his reticence is due to avarice or any other unworthy motive.
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