Aycock and Amoss1 have reported the recovery of a patient having severe poliomyelitis, with an ascending paralysis which involved the respiratory muscles. As a last resort, they gave the patient an intravenous injection of hypertonic Ringer's solution and an intraspinal injection of serum from a convalescent patient.
The ideas which guided Aycock and Amoss in the development of their method of treatment were based on experimental and pathologic investigations. Weed and Hughson2 had shown that "the intravenous injection of strongly hypertonic solutions causes a prolonged and profound fall in the pressure of the cerebrospinal fluid, preceded usually by a sharp rise." These investigators had noted also an actual shrinkage in the size of the brain and spinal cord following the intravenous injection, an observation which had suggested to them that such treatment might cause an aspiration of materials from the subarachnoid space into the perivascular lymph spaces of