Immunosuppression and Infection — Progress?

One characteristic of contemporary physicians is the ease with which they have accepted Shakespeare's tenet that "Diseases desperate grown by desperate appliance are relieved...."1 Oncologists, rheumatologists, tissue transplanters and others are activists. They administer therapy that predictably induces profound suppression of the immune response and often leads to a variety of bacterial and nonbacterial infections that were considered medical curiosities only 20 years ago.2 Implicit in this behavior are several assumptions: the first, of course, is that the frequency of cure and palliation will justify the price of iatrogenic infection; the second is that current therapy will evolve rapidly in . . .