VAUGHAN ON VALUE OF SCIENTIFIC RESEARCH TO STATE. 25 



dispaso from whicli tlioy suffored, and lie y)i'Osoiited to one of the journals 

 of the time a short contribution upon this subject. His labors attracted 

 but little attention and that little was for the most part in the form of 

 ridicule. Some wars later Davaine took u]) the rame line of work and 

 pushed it a little furth':»r. lie oonlirmed Pollender's observation of the 

 pre*-ence of the rod-like bodies in the blood of animals sick with anthrax, 

 but closer study showed him that these orjjanisms. — for such he believed 

 them to be, — were not always present in the earlier stages of the dis- 

 ease. Next he ascertained that if he took the blood containing these 

 rod-like bodies and injected it into a healthy animal the second animal 

 developed anthrax, while blood which did not contain these organisms 

 di i not transmit the disease to other animals. This was an important 

 step in advance. Occasionally there had been a physician who had 

 claimed that certain diseases must be due to minute micro-organisms or 

 germs, but no one had ever seen anything of this kind, because the 

 demonstration of the existence of germs had to await the development of 

 the compound microscope. After Davaine, his work was taken up by 

 Pasteur and then by Koch and a host of others until it has developed 

 into the great science of bacteriology. Now let us stop for a moment, 

 look about us. and see something of the great benefits that have come to 

 mankind from the researches of Pollendcr, Davaine, Pasteur. Koch, and 

 others. Upon the discoveries made by these men the whole science of pre- 

 ventve medicine as it stands today has been built. As a result of these 

 experinients the last fifty years has been freer from eipdemics than any 

 other equal period in the history of the world. Every time we disinfect 

 a room after a case of diT>htheria or scarlet fever we are utilizing that 

 knowledge, the first contribution to which was made by the modest physi- 

 cian Pollender in 18'9. It was this discovery, and the science that has 

 been built upon it, which enabled this nation in 1802 to arrest Asiatic 

 Cholera in New York harbor and prevent its entrance and dissemination 

 in this country. These discoveries have developed the various processes 

 of disinfection now in vogue by means of which the spread of disease has 

 been so greatly restricted. They have so changed methods of quarantine 

 that the name now applied to the prevention of the introduction of dis- 

 ease into a community or a country is a misnomer. In the ojden times 

 quarantine meant forty days of detention, and even with this, disease 

 w;)« not always arrested, becau^'c the germs lingered in the hair or in the 

 clothing during the period of quarantine and were subsequently carried 

 ashore and disseminated. Now quarantine has a wholly different mean- 

 ing. It means a few hours of detention with thorough disinfection, and 

 when scientifically done it means the certain restriction of disease. We 

 can hardly estimate the great benefit that this has been to commerce, and 

 the greater benefits that are still likely to follow from less prolonged 

 detention and more thorough disinfection. The science of bacteriology, 

 founded upon the simple experiments mentioned above, has enabled man- 

 kind to practically stamp out certain of the infectious diseases. For in- 

 stance, typhus fever, which once contributed largely to the mortality 

 lists of every Inrge city, now is known only in certain obscure and unclean 

 parts of the world. The mortality in typhoid fever has been reduced 

 from nearly thirty per cent to less than ten per cent, while at the same 

 tin'e the number of cases has been decreased in still greater proportion. 

 Under the knowledge which we have gained by the study of the causal 

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