Acute contagious bacterial infection marked by the formation of a false membrane in the throat and other air passages causing difficulty in breathing

Usage examples of diphtheria.

Koch set to work, alone, for Loeffler had set out to track down the microbe of diphtheria and Gaffky was busy trying to find the sub-visible author of typhoid fever.

If those beasts come down with a disease exactly like human diphtheria, then .

In five days they were dead, with exactly those symptoms their brothers had, after injections of the living diphtheria bacilli.

Staggering about, and dreadfully straggly looking beasts they were, but they were getting better from diphtheria, these creatures whose untreated companions had died days before.

He took these creatures and shot an enormous dose of diphtheria bacilli into them.

He mixed this, in a glass tube, with a large amount of the poisonous soup in which the diphtheria microbes had grown.

He mixed diphtheria poison with the serum of a healthy guinea-pig who was not immune, who had never had diphtheria or been cured from it either, and this serum did not hinder one bit the murderous action of the poison.

Like some victorious general swept on by the momentum of his first bloody success, he began shooting diphtheria microbes, and iodine tri-chloride, and the poison of diphtheria microbes, into rabbits, into sheep, into dogs.

On the night of Christmas, a child desperately sick with diphtheria cried and kicked a little as the needle of the first syringe full of antitoxin slid under its tender skin.

On the first of February, 1894, Roux of the narrow chest and hatchet face and black skull cap, walked into the diphtheria ward of the Hospital for sick children, carrying bottles of his straw-colored, miracle-working stuff.

He began his merciful and maybe life-saving injections, and every one of the more than three hundred threatened children who came into the hospital during the next five months received good doses of the diphtheria antitoxin.

Buda-Pesth did not think of figures and they carried home the tidings of the antitoxin to all corners of the world, in a few years the antitoxin treatment of diphtheria became orthodox, and now there is not one doctor out of a thousand who will not swear that this antitoxin is a beautiful cure.

I can only hope, if another wave of the dreadful diphtheria of the eighties sweeps over the world again, I can only hope that Roux was right.

Park, and all over America, and in Germany, hundreds of thousands of babies and school-children are being ingeniously and safely turned into so many small factories for the making of antitoxin, so that they will never get diphtheria at all.

Institute of Robert Koch in Berlin, in those momentous days when Behring was massacring guinea-pigs to save babies from diphtheria and the Japanese Kitasato was doing miraculous things to mice with lockjaw.