Another approach is treating some infections passively. For those bacteria that do their damage by releasing a toxin, such as staphylococcus or diphtheria, if you can neutralize the toxin, that’s as good as killing the pathogen. One form of this method actually hearkens back to preantibiotic days: Serum therapy, invented by German doctor Emil von Behring in the 1890s as a treatment for diphtheria, involves injecting blood serum from someone who has already had the same infection into the patient.
