as a faithful record for the year
(1906) in which it was begun. I must not expose any professional man to
ruin by connecting his name with the entire freedom of criticism which
I, as a layman, enjoy; but it will be evident to all experts that my
play could not have been written but for the work done by Sir Almroth
Wright in the theory and practice of securing immunization from
bacterial diseases by the inoculation of "vaccines" made of their own
bacteria: a practice incorrectly called vaccinetherapy (there is nothing
vaccine about it) apparently because it is what vaccination ought to be
and is not. Until Sir Almroth Wright, following up one of Metchnikoff's
most suggestive biological romances, discovered that the white
corpuscles or phagocytes which attack and devour disease germs for us do
their work only when we butter the disease germs appetizingly for them
with a natural sauce which Sir Almroth named opsonin, and that our
production of this condiment continually rises and falls rhythmically
from negligibility to the highest efficiency, nobody had been able
even to conjecture why the various serums that were from time to time
introduced as having effected marvellous cures, presently made such
direful havoc of some unfortunate patient that they had to be dropped
hastily. The quantity of sturdy lying that was necessary to save the
credit of inoculation in those days was prodigious; and had it not been
for the devotion shown by the military authorities throughout Europe,
who would order the entire disappearance of some disease from their
armies, and bring it about by the simple plan of changing the name
under which the cases were reported, or for our own Metropolitan Asylums
Board, which carefully suppressed all the medical reports that revealed
the sometimes quite appalling effects of epidemics of revaccination,
there is no saying what popular reaction might not have taken place
against the whole immunization movement in therapeutics.

The situation was saved when Sir Almroth Wright pointed out that if you
inoculated a patient with pathogenic germs at a moment when his powers
of cooking them for consumption by the phagocytes was receding to its
lowest point, you would certainly make him a good deal worse and perhaps
kill him, whereas if you made precisely the same inoculation when the
cooking power was rising to one of its periodical climaxes, you would
stimulate it to still further exertions and produce just the oppo