<unk>  (also called<unk><unk> 's vaccine,<unk>  vaccine,<unk> 's fluid or mixed bacterial vaccine) is a mixture containing<unk>  filtered from killed bacteria of species Streptococcus pyogenes and Serratia marcescens, named after William<unk> , a surgical oncologist at the Hospital for Special Surgery who developed the mixture in the late 19th century as a treatment for cancer. There is no evidence that<unk>  have any effectiveness in treating cancer, and use of them risks causing serious harm. But although they have no place in modern oncology, their importance to the history of medicine is something other than merely a snake-oil patent medicine; as explained by a 1997 book on the history of cancer immunotherapy, their use in the late nineteenth and early 20th centuries represented a precursor to modern immunotherapy, although at that time their mechanism of action was not at all understood. Whereas<unk>  and some other doctors of the day suspected that the<unk>  occasionally killed tumors, it is suspected in retrospect that the<unk>  probably stimulated the patients' immune systems in ways that occasionally created tumor-fighting effects incidentally. However, the list of caveats that qualified this glimpse of success is extensive: the benefits were always limited to a small minority of patients, the<unk>  were not tested by modern clinical trial standards of methodology, the benefits were not scientifically reproducible even by the era's standards (let alone modern ones), the formula for the preparation was never standardized, the adverse effects were often horrible (not least because cytokine release syndrome was probably often involved), and cell-mediated immunity, which is what the<unk>  probably indirectly led to in a slim subset of patients, was not even understood at the time, let alone suspected as the mechanism of action. The net result today is that<unk>  is recognized as a pioneer of immunotherapy, even though his<unk>  preparation is not a safe and effective medication by today's standards and he himself was never an immunologist.
Coley's toxins
Hemorrhagic cystitis
Purple urine bag syndrome
Prostatitis
Interstitial cystitis
Acute prostatitis
Pyelonephritis
Urinary bladder disease