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.
…
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.
…
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.
…
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.
…
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.
…
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.
…
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…
…
, 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 .
…
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.
…
[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…
…
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.
…
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.
…
I have indicated that there are three methods of alimentary
anaphylaxis… When a dog
ingests crepitin for the first time, he never vomits.
…
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.
…
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.
