SENSITIZATIONS

Abstract

In medicine the frequent inability of conscientious workers to verify one another's results often causes confusion and disputes. There are many explanations that can be advanced as possible causes of these discrepancies, and it seems necessary to attempt to fix and prove some of them. It is obvious that one of the most important criteria to be observed in repeating and checking up is that of exactly reproducing all the conditions of the original experiments or observations. While every conscientious worker does this to the utmost of his ability, too many fail to realize that in spite of this, no two biologic experiments can be identical. Through a chance observation we have come to the conclusion that one factor in particular, which has frequently been assumed to be a constant, or at least without particular influence, may actually be a variable of considerable importance in its effect. This factor is