Word: pus
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...hereditary. Plain overeating does not bring it on unless the glands are frail to begin with. Most people who develop diabetes are overweight, but when the disease begins, they lose weight, develop a voracious appetite, a quenchless thirst. In the advanced stages, the blood is heavily laden with sugar, pus germs flourish, fat metabolism goes awry, and a victim's body is flooded with poisonous waste products...
Last week doctors hailed an old conqueror of the dread staphylococcus germ. Considered by some scientists a virus, by others an enzyme, this germ-eater is called bacteriophage. Strains of bacteriophage are found in the human intestinal tract, in urine, pus, blood and sewage. About 25 years ago, bacteriophage was first isolated by a British scientist from a dead germ colony. The mysterious substance that killed the bacteria was able to pass through a fine filter and infect other colonies. Some doctors soon dreamed of it as a universal panacea. (Sinclair Lewis dramatized this hope in his novel Arrowsmith.) Compared...
Bacteriophage is almost as elusive as filtrable viruses; it can scarcely be seen under a high-powered microscope, and must be cultured on a special nitrogen compound called asparagine. For every patient, said Dr. MacNeal, he must send a sample of blood or pus containing the bacteria to special laboratories, have the bacteriophage made to order. It is injected into the veins, as much as a quart in eight hours. Since it is difficult to culture, doctors seldom think of using it until the "extreme stage" of illness. According to Dr. MacNeal, bacteriophage first weakens bacteria with special enzymes, then...
Then Dubos found in soil samples a spore-bearing bacillus which actually kills five kinds of pneumococcus; staphylococcus (the pus germ), streptococcus, the diphtheria bacillus. The killing agent is a non-protein substance which Dr. Dubos has isolated in crystalline form. One hundred-thousandth of a gram* of the stuff is enough to destroy a billion pneumococci in two hours...
...well-known doctor, graduate of Dartmouth, a leader of his class in Harvard Medical School, Dr. Stubbs spends most of his time at dingy Frederick Douglass Hospital. Here he looks after a ward of some 25 patients with advanced tuberculosis, whose lungs he deflates and drains of pus...