Word: serum
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...received 30 lashes and was committed to the care of the Nazis' sadistic quacks in the Ravensburg Experimental Station. Eight injections of poison in her right eye blinded it. Other injections destroyed the hearing nerve in one ear. Then the Nazis injected typhus into her blood to make serum. In the typhus block they did not bother to feed prisoners. The countess' last memory of Ravensburg was of feebly trying to fend off a ravenous woman prisoner turned cannibal. Two days later Yvonne awoke in Sweden. The Swedish Red Cross, accompanying Allied liberation troops, had found her among...
Philpot bought a dozen king snakes and, with the help of his pharmacology professor, Dr. Ralph G. Smith, set about extracting a serum which would be harmless in itself and still neutralize the venom of rattlers and moccasins. The first difficulty was to get enough blood out of a king snake. Eventually, Philpot hit upon the simple idea of cutting off the snakes' tails. In this way, he got as much as 40 cc of blood from a five-foot snake and 20 cc or more of serum from the blood...
Instead of exposing himself to deadly snakes to test the serum, Philpot bought rattlesnake and moccasin venom in powdered form. Then he went to work on mice. He found that a mouse could be injected with 2½ to 3½ times the lethal dose of viper venom, and still survive if promptly given an injection of king snake serum. Better yet, he found that his king snake extract was three to four times more effective than a commercial preparation made, by a far more difficult process, from the blood of venom-injected horses...
...advantages of the new and sharper tool were obvious. Unlike routine chest X rays, the serum test will disclose tuberculosis in other parts of the body besides the lungs. An X ray shows lung spots, but the serum test helps to determine whether the spots are healed tuberculosis scars or other lung diseases such as cancer, abscess, pneumonia or silicosis...
...simplicity for patient and doctor, the serum test closely resembles the Wassermann test for syphilis. Its originators recommended that doctors use it the same way: take the blood sample and send it to a laboratory, instead of trying to complete the process themselves...