i88 CONTEMPORARY SCIENCE 



the present war. The soil of Belgium and France, which 

 has been cultivated and roamed over by animals for more 

 than twenty centuries, is highly infected. Over ten dif- 

 ferent gas-producing bacteria have been found. 



Sidney Rowland's experiment 26 well shows the viru- 

 lent infection of the soil. Shaking up some of the soil 

 from the trenches with some water, he injected a few 

 drops into a guinea-pig and it was dead in eighteen hours 

 with widely diffused gas gangrene. Soldiers have died 

 from the disease in thirty-six hours. 



Delorme has advised, as the germ is anaerobic, the in- 

 jection of peroxide of hydrogen. Hartmann believes it 

 needful to open the wounds freely and employ thorough 

 irrigation with the peroxide 27 a most important pro- 

 cedure. Early treatment of infected wounds even in cases 

 of gas gangrene resulted favorably in the hands of Cazin. 

 Of 158 cases received even up to forty-eight hours after 

 battle all recovered in spite of their serious nature. Among 

 those received after four or five days* transportation the 

 mortality reached 10 and even 20 per cent. 28 



I have related the terrible mortality from typhoid in 

 the Boer and the Spanish-American wars. The one bright 

 spot in the present war is the conquest of typhoid. In 

 spite of greatly increased numbers and of most unfavor- 

 able sanitary conditions in the trenches as I have shown, 

 conditions which in former wars would have given rise to 

 dreadful epidemics of typhoid, the following statistics in 

 the British army officially given to Parliament on March 

 4, I9I5, 29 show emphatically how well this scourge of 

 every past campaign has been conquered. There had 

 been only 606 cases in all: 247 among the partially (136) 

 and fully (in) inoculated, with two deaths (0.81 per 



26 Brit. Med. Jour., Nov. 28, 1914, p. 913. 



27 Jour. Am. Med. Ass., Jan. 16, 1915, p. 259. See also Law- 

 son and Whitehouse, Brit. Jour. Surg., Jan. 9, 1915, p. 444. 



z *Jour. Am. Med. Ass., Jan. 16, 1915, p. 259. 

 29 Brit. Med. Jour., March 13, 1915, p. 485. 



