THE NATURE AND USES OF LYSED TYPHOID VACCINES

Abstract

Up to a few years ago, the therapy for typhoid fever wandered in a maze of vague empiricism. To the person's bodily resistance, almost unhelped, was entrusted the task of aiding his recovery. At best, the only available aid lay in an irrational therapy, or equally irrational dietetics. The first attempts at chemotherapy and serotherapy were such failures that, after short trials, these were abandoned so that medical men were led to renounce all attempts at specific therapy. Then came the advent of vaccinotherapy, an advent which reopened the subject. I shall discuss the vaccine therapy for typhoid and paratyphoid fever, with special emphasis on lysed vaccines. From Di Cristina's 1 first experiments in twenty-one cases of typhoid fever, made in 1916, and my own which followed during the same year, 2 in which I studied forty-six cases of typhoid and paratyphoid fever, up to the present time, many experiments