Background
Charles Richet, the son of Alfred Richet, a professor in the University of Paris, was born in Paris on August 25, 1850.
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(This book was originally published prior to 1923, and rep...)
This book was originally published prior to 1923, and represents a reproduction of an important historical work, maintaining the same format as the original work. While some publishers have opted to apply OCR (optical character recognition) technology to the process, we believe this leads to sub-optimal results (frequent typographical errors, strange characters and confusing formatting) and does not adequately preserve the historical character of the original artifact. We believe this work is culturally important in its original archival form. While we strive to adequately clean and digitally enhance the original work, there are occasionally instances where imperfections such as blurred or missing pages, poor pictures or errant marks may have been introduced due to either the quality of the original work or the scanning process itself. Despite these occasional imperfections, we have brought it back into print as part of our ongoing global book preservation commitment, providing customers with access to the best possible historical reprints. We appreciate your understanding of these occasional imperfections, and sincerely hope you enjoy seeing the book in a format as close as possible to that intended by the original publisher.
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Charles Richet, the son of Alfred Richet, a professor in the University of Paris, was born in Paris on August 25, 1850.
He studied medicine in Paris and intended to become a surgeon, but he soon abandoned surgery for physiology. He graduated at Paris as a doctor of medicine in 1869 and as a doctor of science in 1878.
He became a lecturer in physiology in 1879 and in 1887 professor of physiology in the Faculty of Medicine at Paris. In 1890 the phenomenon of antitoxic immunity was discovered, and in 1891 diphtheria antitoxin was first used in treating diphtheria. Richet wrote numerous works on physiology and edited two journals. He retired from his chair in 1927 and died in Paris on December 4, 1935.
(This book was originally published prior to 1923, and rep...)
(This book was originally published prior to 1923, and rep...)
(This book was digitized and reprinted from the collection...)
(This is a pre-1923 historical reproduction that was curat...)
(This is a reproduction of a book published before 1923. T...)
Richet found that the guinea pigs used for testing diphtheria antitoxin became acutely ill if long intervals separated the test injections. About 1900, while cruising in tropical waters, Richet studied the poison of the tropical jellyfish, the Portuguese man-of-war. Working with Paul Portier, he found that injection of a glycerol solution of the poison produced the symptoms of poisoning by the jellyfish. On their return to France they studied the toxins of local jellyfish. They determined the minimum dose that was fatal for dogs several days after its injection. Smaller doses than this produced only transient effects. But if a dog that had been injected with a small dose received a similar small dose after an interval of several weeks, a violent reaction killed the dog. By 1902 Richet had studied this phenomenon in different animals. Reactions produced by the injection of antitoxins or minute doses of toxins had already been called prophylactic, or protective. Richet realized that in this new phenomenon the first dose sensitized the animal, so that the second injection produced a violent reaction. The first dose was the opposite of prophylactic, and he therefore called the phenomenon anaphylaxis. He showed clearly that the first injection of an animal toxin sensitized the test animal to even a very small second injection, and that, with very small doses, the violent symptoms following the second injection were out of all proportion to the mild symptoms following the first. He also established that, to produce the violent reaction, there must be an interval of several weeks between the injections. In 1903 Nicolas Maurice Arthus of Lausanne described the Arthus phenomenon. If a rabbit was injected subcutaneously with repeated doses of horse serum, no effect was produced by the subsequent injections at first, but as the interval from the first injection lengthened, the injection site became swollen, hardened, and ulcerous. In 1905 Richard Otto showed that it was not the toxin in the "diphtheria antitoxin" (at that time a mixture of toxin and antitoxin was used) that produced serious effects in guinea pigs injected with repeated small doses at long intervals, but the horse serum in which the toxin was contained. Further, the reaction depended not upon the dose but upon the time interval. It was soon shown that a guinea pig injected with horse serum showed no hypersensitivity to the serum of other animals, and also that specific reactions occurred after the injection of milk, egg, or muscle extract. It was thus conclusively demonstrated that Richet's anaphylaxis was due to the injection of any protein, whether or not it was toxic on the first injection. In 1907 Richet showed that, if the serum of an anaphylactic dog was injected into a normal dog, the latter became anaphylactic. The anaphylactic state could therefore be passively transmitted, and it was an antigen-antibody reaction.
Quotations:
"I never said it was possible. I only said it was true. "
"I possess every good quality, but the one that distinguishes me above all is modesty. "
"My amateur interest in astronomy brought out the term "magnitude, " which is used for the brightness of a star. "
member of the Académie des Sciences
Richet was a proponent of eugenics, advocating sterilization and marriage prohibition for those with mental disabilities. He expressed his racist and eugenist ideas in his 1919 book La Sélection Humaine.
In 1877, Charles Richet married Amélie Aubry. They had five sons, Georges, Jacques, Charles (who, like his father, was Professor in the Faculty of Medicine in Paris and was, in his turn, succeeded by his son Gabriel), Albert and Alfred, and two daughters, Louise (Mme Lesné) and Adèle (Mme le Ber).