Word: serums
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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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...
...contents of the test tube are unclotted in the morning, the patient has no active tuberculosis. But if the patient is tuberculous, his blood serum will contain antibodies manufactured in the body to combat the tubercle bacilli. These antibodies will cause the sheep's red blood cells to clot. The extent of the clotting gives a measure of the severity of the disease. Thus, repeated tests can show whether or not a course of treatment is working effectively...
...Sidney Rothbard put the technique to wide practical use at Montefiore Hospital in The Bronx. Last week he reported at a meeting of the New York Tuberculosis and Health Association that on 1,200 serum samples from 950 patients the test was 92.3% accurate. "This test," said he, "gives the doctors a new tool. It should not be thought of as a test to displace the X ray or any other standard method...
...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...