After reading through this very long text, it seems clear to me that the vast majority of references to “studies” and “injections” etc. are referring to animals—dogs, rabbits, guinea pigs, etc.--not humans. Thus to take one example out of many: “Anaphylaxis has been observed in all animals: the horse, the goat, the ox, the rat, the pigeon, the duck and even recently in frogs.” One may of course fault Charles Richet and his scientistic culture of the time for their indulgence in mistreatment of animals; but to conflate that with some dastardly Mengelian abuse of human subjects would not be supported by the text. The small fraction of references to human subjects are either to treating what they thought was already a disease before treatment started (e.g., “diphtheria”) or involves anecdotes of some lone scientist injecting himself then getting consent of his students to try it; and so forth.
More extensively, I provide below many lengthy quotes from the text to show this. I have added yellow italics to phrases for emphasis; blue highlight are my comments:
HERE FOLLOWS EXTENDED QUOTES from Charles Richet's Nobel Lecture from November of 1913
Anaphylaxis takes place also in human subjects and has caused death in certain instances. It is indeed probable that sudden death following the bursting of a hydatid cyst is an anaphylactic phenomenon. Some years back I was in Brazil and I heard the story of a doctor who had given himself a preventive injection of anti-plague serum. The next year a new outbreak of plague was feared so he persuaded his students to have a preventive injection of the same serum. He set the example by giving himself another one. This was however an unleashing injection and his body had been affected by the first. The second injection was fatal and within two hours he was dead.
Now however the effects of anaphylaxis in mankind are very well known. Two doctors from Vienna, Pirquet and Schick, have studied the matter with the greatest care. They have described serum-sickness (“Serum-Krankheit”) in children subjected to injections of diphtheria serum [the children already had diphtheria and they injected them with what they thought was a cure—this may be ignorant and negligent, but it’s not dastardly malevolence on a Mengelian scale until proven so] and they saw that it was in most cases an anaphylactic phenomenon. It is only in the rarest cases that the first injection is productive of immediate reaction. When it comes to the second injection, an immediate reaction follows for 90% of the cases, that is to say when the period between the first and second injection is from ten to thirty days.
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At first sight it looks as if the specificity is pushed very far. For example if the preparatory injection is of goat’s milk, then the unleashing injection will be much stronger and will have more intensive effects if made from goat’s milk than if made from cow’s or sheep’s. Again, for the unleashing injection of horse serum to take maximum effect, the first injection should also be of horse serum. It is obvious that the animal in this case is still somewhat sensitive to a second injection with serum from a dog or rabbit, but the effect is far less. It is thus permitted to conclude that there is specificity, that is to say necessary identity between the preparatory and the unleashing injection.
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Two further series of observations I have made quite recently do lead me to question the hard and fast rules for specificity in anaphylaxis one is tempted to lay down. First, when I gave a preparatory injection of crepitin and I determined one month later the emetic dose (that means the dose causing vomiting) of apomorphine, I saw that with normal dogs a dose of apomorphine hydrochloride equal to 0.00275 of the salt per kilogram caused vomiting in 21% of the dogs, whereas with dogs initially injected with crepitin, for the same dose of apomorphine hydrochloride, vomiting ensued in 63% of them.
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Another experiment of prime importance is this, for it shows the very nature of the anaphylactic process. In April 1907 I showed that the injection of serum from an anaphylactized dog induced an anaphylactic state in untreated dogs , as if this serum contained the toxic substance which activates the unleashing injection.
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The effects of this new poison are extremely strong, as the following experiment will show. It was carried out on a bitch [“bitch” of course being a female dog] that had been given an active dose of crepitin mixed with the anaphylactic serum.
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To evaluate this reaction, we must mention a valuable experiment of Claude Bernard carried out long ago. Bitter almonds contain two substances: amygdalin which is harmless and emulsin which is harmless too. Animal subjects survive an injection of either amygdalin or emulsin.
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I will cite as illustration some experiments which I am still making on the action of chloroform on dogs. On a dog chloroformed for the first time…
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, after an interval of three weeks, a new break-up takes place in the liver as a result of the second chloroformization, then this behaves like a second protein injection, the unleashing injection on an anaphylactized animal .
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The admirable contributions of R. Koch, which has since been borne out by numberless experiments undertaken by others, showed that a normal animal does not react to tuberculin, whereas tuberculous animals do react to doses a thousand times weaker .
When it came to questions of detail, considerable differences were found to appear. In fact a first injection of tuberculin does not make normal animals sensitive to a second injection.
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[finally, a mention of human subjects – but notice the mentions are not in the indicative, indicating they have been done, but are couched as epistemic modal constructions, such as “may be” thus denoting speculation, not actual experiments – except in one case (see near the end of the following quotes). That one case is with “colleagues” who had injected into “patients with cancer” – again, this could be ignorant & negligent, but absent proof they coerced the patients or that the patients were not dying, it would be going out on a limb to use this as evidence of some nefarious Mengelian procedure]
It may be thought that general application can be made of this anaphylactic method of diagnosis. Two methods lie open. One, the patient may be given a subcutaneous injection of specific serum to see if he is sensitive to the reaction. The other is to take the patient’s serum and inject it into guinea-pigs, seeing after the passage of two or three days if the guinea-pigs are sensitive to such and such bacterial toxin.
I considered whether this method of diagnosis by anaphylaxis might not be made use of in cancer. Taking cancer tumours and precipitating by alcohol the aqueous extract of such tumours, a precipitate results which admits of purification by being dissolved and precipitated in successive steps. This dry product can then be dissolved in water and injected into patients suffering from cancer. If anaphylacto-diagnosis of cancer did really exist, this injection would produce a certain reaction. This was not the case. Some of my colleagues made the injection of this product into patients with cancer. The effects of the injection were absolutely nil.
[then he goes back to describing animal experiments]
While on the subject of negative experiments, I wish to say a word on what I call homogenic anaphylaxis. The aim was to discover if the injection into an animal of blood from another subject of the same species, provokes a stronger reaction at the second injection than at the first, always given the same source for the transfusion in both cases.
Here again the results were absolutely nil. A dog A was injected with 70 gram per kilo of the blood of another dog B. Not much happened. A month later, the same dog A that had been treated was given a further injection…
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It was for the first time demonstrated by Rosenau and Anderson in 1906 that guinea-pigs were sensitive to horse serum after first ingesting horse serum by way of the digestive tract.
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A dog is given cooked meat: no leucocytosis results. A dog is given raw meat, even one fifth in quantity compared with the cooked meat, then in three or four hours time, leucocytosis results.
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I have indicated that there are three methods of alimentary anaphylaxis… When a dog ingests crepitin for the first time, he never vomits.
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I have observed in this connection a remarkable fact: a period of one year between the initial ingestion and the subsequent parenteral injection. A dog ingested in June 1911 a strong dose of crepitin and survived.
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We shall conclude by reiterating the various phenomena and attempting to establish their import in general terms.
In the first place anaphylaxis, like immunization, creates humoral differentiations between different individuals.
A guinea-pig that is anaphylactized by horse serum will not be identical to untreated guinea-pigs nor to guinea-pigs anaphylactized by ox or dog serum.
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