WHICH IMMUNOMODULATOR?

Abstract

Immunotherapy has come a long way since George Bernard Shaw lampooned the medical profession in his 1906 play The Doctor's Dilemma. One of the characters, fashionable physician Dr Ralph Bloomfield Bonington, was a devout disciple of immunotherapy at the beginning of this century:‘… Drugs can only repress symptoms; they cannot eradicate disease … There is at bottom only one genuinely scientific treatment for all diseases, and that is to stimulate the phagocytes … they devour the disease and the patient recovers — unless, of course, he's too far gone‘.In this same play, Shaw also caricatured surgeons and perhaps even predicted thymectomy for cancer prevention, for the surgeon Cutler Walpole said:‘… Phagocytosis is pure rot, the knife is the real remedy … it amuses me to hear you physicians talking about clinical experience. What do you see at the bedside but the outside of the patient. What you need is daily familiarity with people's insides. The nuciform sac is full of decay … cut it out. The operation ought to be compulsory. It's ten times more important than vaccination‘.1