Question

Within a day after analyzing the clinical data, Doyle came to a startling conclusion: “The whole thing was experimental and premature,” he wrote first in a letter to the editor, published in the London Daily Telegraph on Nov. 20, 1890, and then, more definitively, in his long article for the Review of Reviews, which ran in December of that year. While the rest of the world rejoiced over the reported conquest of tuberculosis, Doyle argued that “Koch’s lymph” might remove traces of the diseased tissue, but it left deadly germs “deep in the invaded country.” Its real value, Doyle asserted, was as “an admirable aid to diagnosis,” in that a “single injection” would help doctors decide definitively whether a patient was “in any way tubercular.”Doyle was absolutely correct in his conclusions.Koch’s lymph, or what we now refer to as tuberculin, was essentially a glycerin extract of a pure culture of tuberculosis microbes. In the decades before the development of the much safer purified-protein-derivative (PPD) test for tuberculosis, this “lymph” became an essential diagnostic tool to detect whether or not a person was, in fact, infected with the tuberculosis germ.A few months later, in early 1891, after several highly publicized treatment failures and a few deaths associated with the administration of the so-called curative medication, Dr. Koch publicly retracted his earlier announcement. The lymph, he explained, was an excellent means of diagnosing tuberculosis but an actual cure for the “White Plague” was nowhere in sight.Even from the distance of 125 years, it is difficult not to be impressed by how Doyle figured the matter out so quickly, while it took Dr. Koch, one of the most illustrious medical detectives in the world, many more months to realize his error. find a claim/counterclaim quote

Answer 1

Claim (Arthur Conan Doyle): “The whole thing was experimental and premature.”

Counterclaim (Dr. Koch, retracting his cure claim): “The lymph ... was an excellent means of diagnosing tuberculosis but an actual cure for the ‘White Plague’ was nowhere in sight.”