The question of the reliability of the Wassermann reaction as applied to post mortem sera, is an important one, not only from the theoretical, but also from the practical standpoint. The purpose of this paper is to review briefly the work already done along this line, and to report our own experiences with the Noguchi modification of the Wassermann reaction on sera obtained after death.
The literature bearing on the subject is nearly all German, and it is therefore in that country that there has arisen the most discussion and disagreement as to the value of the reaction. The question has hardly been touched on in American literature, and only recently in the English.
It was only two years after Wassermann made public his test that Franke!1 and Much (1908) published the first paper on this reaction, as applied to cadaver serum. They used several varieties of antigen, obtaining