George Frederick Laidlaw

“ Some physicians have long insisted that they could relieve hay fever by diet. For instance, I once asked a physician of large general practice what he did for hay fever. He smiled in an incredulous way that I have noticed before among people who never had hay fever and replied, "I find that [Pg 114] if people will stop eating strawberries and not eat too much meat, they soon get rid of their hay fever." This answer surprised me for I knew that in his long practice, he must have seen many cases of hay fever and my experience had been that diet had no influence on the symptoms. ”

“ Because we can immunize successfully against one disease, it does not follow that the same methods will immunize against another disease. Each disease is a problem in itself and may require its own methods. Nor because we can immunize the guinea-pig in the laboratory, does it follow that the same methods are applicable in the human patient. The only proof that we can immunize against hay fever is to immunize against hay fever. ”

“ Cellular pathology with its wonderful revelation of the anatomical seat of disease and bacteriology, with its still more wonderful revelation of the external cause of disease, so dazzled the eye and the mind that we forgot that the sensitive animal body behind the attacking microbe had its changes, too, its changes in body chemistry that could not be stated in terms of cells and bacteria. The pendulum is swinging back now to a consideration of the constitution of the body on which the microbe or poison acts, its resistance or immunity, its anaphylaxis or allergie. ”

“ The marvel is that any animal remains alive; and no animal would remain alive were it not for a system of protection by which these poisons are rendered harmless, usually by a slight rearrangement of the atoms in their molecule which is one of the wonders of organic chemistry.
We are far from knowing just what happens when we pour acids and alkalies and foods into this witches' cauldron of blood. ”

“ However, Nature is a wasteful worker, wasteful of her material, and she kills a great many of her children with measles and scarlet-fever and small-pox and yellow-fever while immunizing the lucky ones. A Health Board that would kill so many people while immunizing the rest would be a public scandal. Yet it is probable that Nature's way is the most effective and that the best immunizer is the disease itself, as Koch found with tuberculosis among his guinea-pigs that the best protection against tuberculosis was inoculation with living tubercle bacilli, not with dead ones ”

“ While we have known for a long time that some foods did not agree with everybody, science is just now demonstrating that one man's meat is literally another man's poison by testing the different food proteins on the skin and calling the condition food anaphylaxis or food allergie. ”

“ Even Nature's immunity is not perfect in all diseases, as many a patient with his sixth attack of grippe or third pneumonia or fortieth year of hay fever has learned most feelingly; and this irregularity of natural immunity bears directly on the proposal to immunize patients against hay fever by small and increasing doses of the offending pollen. If the natural disease does not confer lasting immunity, you will have some difficulty in conferring lasting immunity artificially, as the immunologist is just now discovering. ”

“ Of all the foolish things that scientific men quarrel about, one of the most foolish is the question of priority of discovery. A scientist who will welcome the opinion of another scientist agreeing with him the day after he announces his discovery will fight like a cat against evidence that the same man agreed with him the day before. ”

“ Yet hundreds of physicians to-day are making diagnoses of tuberculosis by the skin test; for if there is one thing more difficult than to get a new idea into a doctor's head, it is getting it out again when the idea proves fallacious. So, I view these skin reactions for food and pollens with some suspicion of their real value in diagnosis and prognosis and as guides to treatment. ”

“ Did you ever see a catarrhal conjunctivitis that acted in this way or a cold in the head in which the patient could be cured and catch a fresh cold twenty times a day? I think you never did. A true inflammation requires time, a few hours, for its development, and when an inflammatory exudate oozes into the meshes of the tissue, it requires some days or at least some hours to be absorbed. This one point of rapid appearance and rapid disappearance would forbid our calling the lesion of hay fever a catarrhal inflammation. ”

“ My conclusions on the pollen treatment are that it is in line with our best practice of immunity but that it is still in an experimental stage, the pollens are possibly dangerous even in the hands of a skilled immunologist. In a disease that is usually so easily controlled by rosin-weed, faradism and ichthyol, I would not expose a hay fever patient to the very real danger of anaphylactic [Pg 107] shock. The conditions governing immunity stated in the beginning of this chapter still hold good. It is transient. Already some of the early workers have discontinued the practice. ”

“ The first man to attempt to apply the methods of modern immunity to hay fever was Dunbar, of Hamburg, in 1903, with this pollantin. He attempted to duplicate in hay fever the triumph of antitoxin in diphtheria by injecting a horse with increasing doses of pollen until the horse became immune to large doses of pollen and his blood full of antibodies. Dunbar expected to confer passive immunity on the hay fever patient by transferring to him this horse serum with its antibodies. There is no better example of the rule that each disease requires its own methods of immunity. ”

“ Looking through the volumes around 1868, when the use of rosin-weed in asthma was being quoted in the south and west, I found many quaint notes and comments, but no mention of rosin-weed. To [Pg 45] any physician who has a taste for the history of his art, I would recommend reading a journal of fifty years ago. So many things have been settled that those old physicians puzzled and fought over that it gives one the sense of amusement or lofty detachment of the gods, looking down on struggling, wriggling humanity, yet knowing all the time how it would come out. ”

“ If the anaphylaxis to the diphtheria antitoxin, horse serum, can develop arthritis, is it not probable that the most striking feature of gout, the inflammation of the joint, is also an anaphylaxis to poisons yet unknown to us but the same poisons that make the gouty urticaria and asthma? ”

“ Call the old tubercular diathesis a sensitization and you have made it the most modern of modern discoveries. So, also, step by step, through bacteriology with its toxins and antitoxins and now with anaphylaxis, from the philosophic ash-heap on which we thought to have thrown it for good and all, like [Pg 89] an old family cat that we thought was dead, comes creeping back that old conception of a gouty diathesis or arthritism, not as dead as we thought it, to complete the explanation of the existence of hay fever. ”

“ The fundamental error in all the literature on hay fever is the teaching that the lesion is a peculiar kind of catarrhal inflammation; whereas it is not an inflammation at all, catarrhal or any other kind. The symptoms of hay fever resemble those of catarrhal inflammation, but the resemblance is only superficial. ”

“ Vomiting is rare, is never serious and ceases spontaneously when the stomach is empty of the drug.
At the Baltimore meeting of the American Institute of Homœopathy, where the use of [Pg 136] rosin-weed in hay fever was first reported, Dr. John Sutherland, of Boston, made the proper criticism that if rosin-weed was harmless and could not produce any effect on the healthy body, he could not understand how it had any power to cure. To this, I had no answer except that I had both taken and given large doses for many years to patients of all ages and had never seen any symptoms develop. ”

“ You can immunize a guinea-pig or a patient to almost anything now-a-days by giving him minute doses gradually increased but the immunity passes off quite rapidly when the treatment is stopped. We have still something to learn from Nature in this respect. Nature can give us one dose of yellow-fever or scarlet-fever or small-pox or measles and make us immune for life but your artificially produced immunity may last for a few weeks or months only. Our closest imitation of natural immunity is vaccination [Pg 93] against small-pox. Here we produce an actual disease, cow-pox ”

“ As with the pollens, a patient who at any time has been poisoned or, as we now say, sensitized by any of these foods, still has circulating in his blood or fixed in his skin the reactive bodies to that food. These reaction bodies react to that food on the skin by redness and swelling. Food proteins that cause no redness and swelling are thought harmless for that patient. Foods that cause the reaction are thought to be those to which the patient has been sensitized and to which he has not developed or maintained an efficient defence. ”

“ As the patient reader of the chapter on Pollens will remember, the anaphylaxis or sensitiveness of the patient to particular pollens is tested by rubbing a speck of different pollens into scratches on the skin. This skin reaction as a test of anaphylaxis was used by Schloss with different foods before it was adopted in hay fever; and it has been taken up by the dermatologist also. The dermatologist has long suspected that certain skin diseases, as urticaria, and eczema, are aggravated or produced by certain foods but he has been unable to demonstrate just what foods were at fault. ”

“ One of the most important powers of that cell body was its power of digesting and assimilating food, and its most important food was the nitrogenous food or protein from which it built up its own body substance. Now, foreign or food protein cannot be simply absorbed as such. Foreign protein is a poison and never tolerated in the blood. The foreign protein used as food must first [Pg 81] be changed into the special kind of protein that the body can use. The foreign protein is changed by splitting its molecule into its simplest parts and then recombining them in the desired form. ”

“ We do not know each step in the mode of action of any medicine or of our foods, either, for that matter; but we do not for that reason stop eating. We should still use the acids and alkalies for their effect on the patient as far as we can see it just as we shall still go on eating food because it nourishes us; but we shall be wise to stop talking so glibly about what we cannot see and do not yet know, the effect of those acids and alkalies on the chemistry of the blood. ”

“ Now, there may well be cases of hay fever as there are known to be cases of that other anaphylaxis, asthma, that are pure examples of food anaphylaxis. In such a case, detecting the irritating food and removing it from the diet is the proper path to cure. The error in our former practice was to divide foods into good and bad for certain diseases. We should rather think of foods as good or bad for a particular patient. ”