At Wilkes-Barre, Pa., two days before Christmas, Daniel Holuk, 5, choked to death when a yellowish leathery membrane plugged his windpipe. Diphtheria. George Washington choked to death in much the same way. So did Josephine, Napoleon Bonaparte' first wife. But Daniel Holuk should not have died. For in 1883-84 Edwin Klebs and Friedrich August Johannes Löffler, scientists working in a happy Germany, discovered the bacillus which produces the diphtheria toxin (poison). And in 1894 Emil von Behring, another honorable German scientist, invented an antitoxin, the injection of which causes the yellowish...
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