WILLIAM TOWNSEND PORTER 8/ 



at stake. The Black Death, or plague, once swept away 

 whole villages, and would do so again were it not for med- 

 ical science. The power of the plague, even to-day, is 

 almost incredible. In Undhera, an Indian village, with a 

 population of nine hundred and fifty, half the men, half 

 the women, and half the children in each household, were 

 inoculated against the plague early in February, 1898. 

 " The plague in the village lasted up to March 26, and fell 

 on twenty-eight families. In these, there were sixty-four 

 not inoculated, and seventy-one inoculated. The sixty- 

 four had twenty-seven cases, with twenty-six deaths ; the 

 seventy-one had eight cases, with three deaths." l Al- 

 most every uninoculated person died. Some of the towns 

 where inoculation was not practised lost half their inhab- 

 itants. " It is said that, in Italy alone, malaria keeps 

 nearly five million acres of ground from cultivation, affects 

 more or less sixty-three provinces and two thousand 

 eight hundred and twenty-three communes, and every 

 year poisons about two million people, killing fifteen 

 thousand of them." 2 I remember that during my studies 

 in the Pathological Institute in Kiel, about one in three 

 of the patients dying of various disorders in the Charity 

 Hospital of that city were found upon autopsy to be tuber- 

 culous. The proportion is no doubt larger in Holstein 

 than in America, but in this country, as well as in Germany, 

 tuberculosis has fairly earned its name of The Great White 

 Plague. 



Such accounts mean little to the layman, who has never 

 fought a losing fight for human life ; he reads them with 

 temperate sorrow; but they rouse the physician and in- 

 vestigator like blows. One can but pity the misinformed 

 enthusiasts who are responsible for the proposed interfer- 



1 From Haffkine's Report, cited in Experiments on Animals, by Stephen 

 Paget, 1900, p. 151. 



2 Paget, loc. cit., p. 184. 



