THE LATE EPIDEMIC OF SMALLPOX. 561 



adjacent county that their readers were victims of a disease which 

 should be fought by quarantine. School boards did not care to dislo- 

 cate the machinery of their system. Manufacturers pleaded for the 

 families likely to be ruined if their works were shut down. In the 

 minds of many there were a shame and a disgrace associated with the 

 fact that they were singled out for the explosions of the pest; and 

 there was some reason for this. Hence, in a considerable proportion of 

 cases, the officers of local government, the large employers of labor, 

 school superintendents and others refused to accept the facts, basing 

 their belief on the evident mildness of the malady, and often upon 

 the remarkable result that after a fortnight or more of the prevalence 

 of the disease in their community there had been either no fatal results 

 or so few that in several hundreds of cases the disproportionate mor- 

 tality was so small as to disprove the accusation that smallpox was 

 prevalent. 



And yet smallpox indeed it was; mitigated, it is true, but still 

 capable of awaking to a frightful activity in a favorable field and at an 

 opportune moment. For it is among the facts established by a bitter 

 experience that the mildest and most modified type of the disease, 

 varioloid, for example, of insignificant features, may be the source of 

 one of those epidemics of smallpox which rival in their mortality the 

 most direful of the scourges that have afflicted the race. 



Why was the late epidemic the mildest in its tjrpe and consequences 

 of any of the same nature that have preceded it ? Why were its features 

 so masked that even physicians of experience failed to recognize them ? 

 Why was the resulting mortality so slight that the malady awakened 

 little dread in the communities which it invaded, the people, made 

 familiar by contact with its manifestations, failing to exhibit the 

 horror which has usually been excited by its presence ? 



The answer is inwrought with the solution of some of the tre- 

 mendous problems of the future of the human race. If devastating 

 plagues cannot be wholly obliterated, can they be so modified by scien- 

 tific methods that they are gradually converted into trifling ailments, 

 productive of minimized danger and followed by trifling sequels? The 

 culture-tubes and culture-plates of our bacteriological laboratories have 

 spelled out the answer in sterilized media. The potency of almost all 

 germs may be first gradually weakened and later annihilated by cultiva- 

 tion in special soils. Fraenkel has demonstrated that an enduring de- 

 crease, even a complete and irrevocable loss of virulence, has been pro- 

 duced by artificial cultivation of most of the different species of patho- 

 genic bacteria, among which may be cited as conspicuous examples the 

 germs of swine-erysipelas, of symptomatic anthrax and of pneumonia. 

 Thus a minute organism, descended from a death-dealing source, may 



VOL. LIX. — 39 



