11)11)] on Medicine and the War 425 



the least wishing to minimise the great work accomplished by the 

 army sm*geon,.I would lay down that during the ivar surgery lias 

 played hut a secondary part. An actor of the first rank billed to 

 perform a secondary part may enact that part so admirably as to put 

 the leading characters into the shade. That has been the case with 

 our war surgeons. Their work has been of the best ; they have 

 achieved notable advances, particularly under the inspiration of 

 General Sir Eoberfc Jones, in the treatment and after-treatment of 

 fractures and wounds of the extremities. The amount of crippling 

 has i>een reduced to a very remarkable degree. But this must be 

 said : the wounded appeal to the onlookers much more than do the 

 victims, say, of pneumonia and dysentery. The man whose honour- 

 able scars remain as an ever-present reminder of the victory of the 

 surgeon over death brings down the house in a way that the soldier 

 stricken by some dread fever and restored to health can never hope 

 to emulate. The hundreds of thousands who through the sanitarian 

 have never been ill at all make no impression whatsoever upon the 

 public : their sound health is taken for granted : it is an evidence of 

 their good physi(|ue : they are to be congratulated, not the physicians 

 who, controlling their surroundings, have saved them from illness. 



This brings me to my point. The great, the outstanding feature 

 of the war has been the triumph of preventive medicine. It is that 

 triumph, and that triumph alone, that has made possible our eventual 

 success. 



For look at the matter dispassionately. While a grateful country 

 owes to the sick or wounded soldier every care, each hospital case 

 weakens the army, not merely by the loss of an individual from the 

 front line, but by the diversion of others from active soldiering to 

 purposes of transport, orderly work, and administration services in 

 ambulance, hospital, hospital trains, and so on. Throughout the 

 centuries campaign after campaign has been brought to nothing or 

 to an end by pestilence. Not le general Fevrier but General 

 Le Fievre was the great leader of the hosts of death and the 

 ultimate victor. Had our sickness and death rolls been what they 

 were at the beginning of the century, in the Boer War, the results 

 of this campaign would have been very different. 



You will understand, therefore, why it is that in attempting this 

 review I place first what I may term preventive pathology — the 

 research into the cause of disease which must precede the scientific 

 application of methods of prevention, based upon these researches 

 and their outcome. Let me give you a few outstanding examples of 

 what has been accomplished. 



The CoNTiJiUED Fevers. 



To-day we all speak glibly of typhoid fever, and even of para- 

 typhoid A and paratyphoid B, of tvphus, relapsing fever, and 



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