THE NEW REMEDY FOR CONSUMPTION.

Shannon News, 14 August 1923, Page 2

THE NEW REMEDY FOR CONSUMPTION.

A, MAN TO WATCH. (By H. Challinor James.) “If the work of Henry Spahlinger fails for the lack of financial support,.” said a British medical collaborator of the famous •'Swiss scientist, “it will be .as big a tragedy for mankind as the great war itself.” Spahlinger has spent the whole of his fortune, more than eighty thousand pounds, in attempting to discover a remedy for humanity’s greatest scourge—tuberculosis. And now when he would put the finishing touches to his triumph, financial embarrassments jeopardise the whole of his life’s work.

Spahlinger does not want money for himself. Proprietary concerns have offered him all he might ever need to exploit the discovery. But tfiie production of his serum is of such a highly specialised and technical character that he, fears to entrust it to a comiipercial undertaking. Incalculable 'damage might be done by a bad serum.' Therefore, to his great credit, he refuses to. expose his fellow creatures to the risk. Spahlinger never speaks of his discovery as a “cure.” All he will admit is that it is the best known remedy lor consumpion. With the modesty of genius he conducted over the ‘‘wonder-house” which constitutes his laboratory on the outskirts of Geneva. Outside and inside are living testimonies to the efficacy of his treatment. Mischievous monkeys, once in the last stages of emaciation, chatter incessantly in the trees, while sleeklooking cows which have suffered with .immunity the injection of sufficient bacilli to kill a whole town, graze peacefully in the meadows. Their attendant is an Englishman, discharged from a London hospital some years ago with & week to live. He says he is now quite fit. Working in darkened rooms with their test tubes, are (half a dozen assistants, all of whom, owe their lives to the modest Swiss. After twelve years’ labour Spahlinger has the finest. collection .qf tuberculosis baccilli extant. There is enough to wipe out a town, in even' tube, and there tare thousands of tubes.

.The .ravages of consumption are I caused not by the bacilli, but by the toxins they set up. Spahlinger has discovered "a score of different toxins, they set up. Spahlinger has discovered a score of different toxins, which the bacilli will release only when attacked. So his genius has invented weird-looking machines which oscillate, rotate, or shake the tubes containing the bacilli at different speeds. Then the toxins thus secured are injected into 20 different high-bred horses, who immediately set- to work to produce the antidote. The horses are then hied, the combined 20 antidotes forming the complete serum, which when injected into the person suffering from tuberculosis at once sets to work to neutralise the bacilli which are destroying the human being. Spahlinger is a doctor of law, not medicine; a fact responsible for the scepticism with which the faculty first received his discovery. But that he is a genius whose work will rank with that of Koch and Louis Pasteur many great men admit. What he is most, anxious to avoid is giving false hope to sufferers. All the stock .of serum has been exhausted in demonstrating its efficacy, and years must elapse before it Can be produced on any scale.