ng of enough microbes to inoculate the entire population of
the globe since human life first appeared on it. But the precautions
necessary to insure that the inoculation shall consist of nothing else
but the required germ in the proper state of attenuation are a very
different matter from the precautions necessary in the distribution
and consumption of beefsteaks. Yet people expect to find vaccines
and antitoxins and the like retailed at "popular prices" in private
enterprise shops just as they expect to find ounces of tobacco and
papers of pins.

THE PERILS OF INOCULATION

The trouble does not end with the matter to be inoculated. There is the
question of the condition of the patient. The discoveries of Sir Almroth
Wright have shown that the appalling results which led to the hasty
dropping in 1894 of Koch's tuberculin were not accidents, but perfectly
orderly and inevitable phenomena following the injection of dangerously
strong "vaccines" at the wrong moment, and reinforcing the disease
instead of stimulating the resistance to it. To ascertain the right
moment a laboratory and a staff of experts are needed. The general
practitioner, having no such laboratory and no such experience, has
always chanced it, and insisted, when he was unlucky, that the results
were not due to the inoculation, but to some other cause: a favorite
and not very tactful one being the drunkenness or licentiousness of
the patient. But though a few doctors have now learnt the danger of
inoculating without any reference to the patient's "opsonic index"
at the moment of inoculation, and though those other doctors who are
denouncing the danger as imaginary and opsonin as a craze or a fad,
obviously do so because it involves an operation which they have neither
the means nor the knowledge to perform, there is still no grasp of the
economic change in the situation. They have never been warned that the
practicability of any method of extirpating disease depends not only on
its efficacy, but on its cost. For example, just at present the world
has run raving mad on the subject of radium, which has excited our
credulity precisely as the apparitions at Lourdes excited the credulity
of Roman Catholics. Suppose it were ascertained that every child in the
world could be rendered absolutely immune from all disease during its
entire life by taking half an ounce of radium to every pint of its
milk. The world would be none the healthier, because not even a