428 Colonel George Adami [Feb. 7, 



I owe to the courtesy of Lieut.-General Sir Thomas Goodwin, 

 D.G.A.M.S., and to Brig.-General Sir WilHam Leishman, the following- 

 data. Among the Imperial troops, steadily through the war. the 

 number of those who submitted themselves to inoculation had in- 

 creased, until now no less than 97 per cent have been thus protected. 

 Although it is true that some 11 per cent of those have not had 

 re-inoculation during the last twelve months, the number of admis- 

 sions to liospital from enteric fever has been reduced to the extra- 

 ordinarily low figure of 1 • 5 per thousand, as compared with 1 per 

 thousand among the Canadians ; and as regards the tens of thou- 

 sands of officers, there was only one death in 1916 and one in 1917. 

 As regards the inoculated and the uninoculated, roughly, in propor- 

 tion to the numbers, there were ten times as many uninoculated 

 admitted to hospital as inoculated. 



With all due deference to the Army surgeons, and their work, 

 they can show no triumph comparable with this. 



Had the same ratio of enteric cases been maintained as in the 

 Boer War, our Canadian Director-General w^ould have had to provide 

 seven more General Hospitals, of 1,040 beds each, throughout the 

 war, some 200 more medical officers, and 500 more nursing sisters. 

 Imagine what would have been the corresponding additional demand 

 for the British Army with its millions in place of the Canadian 

 hundred thousands. 



What is the meaning of these most striking facts ? They mean 

 that, thanks to medical research, we have learnt how to render 

 troops immune to typhoid fever. It does not mean that they were 

 not exposed to infection. Far from it. Flanders with its sodden 

 •counti-yside and stagnant waterways everywhere was rife with the 

 disease; there were 2,000 deaths from typhoid that first winter 

 among the inhabitants among whom our troops w^ere quartered. 

 The German and the French troops, not properly inoculated, or 

 uninoculated, suffered heavily until they too learnt the lesson and 

 followed our methods, and we owe our protection very largely to the 

 -work of the R.A.M.C. 



An able Russian working in India, Dr. Haffkine, had shown that 

 protection could be given against cholera by inoculating individuals 

 -with killed cultures of the cholera spirillum. At the time of the 

 Boer AVar Sir Almroth Wright, then Professor of Pathology at the 

 Army Medical College at Netley, elaborated a similar typhoid vaccine, 

 and obtained encouraging but not wholly satisfactory results. It was 

 left to his successor Colonel, now General, Sir William Leishman to 

 improve Sir Alraroth's methods, and elaborate a vaccine and tech- 

 nique of administration that was thoroughly efficient, so effective 

 that long months before the war it was adopted for the U.S. Army, 

 in which inoculations were made obligatory. Fortunately for 

 Canada, in the spring before the war, and at the suggestion of the 

 late Director-General, Colonel, now General, Carleton Jones. Sir 



