1919] on Medicine and the War 429 



William Leishman had visited Canada, had lectured and demonstrated 

 his methods, and had so convinced those in authority that the 

 enforcement of inoculation for all overseas troops was an easy task. 



AVhen cases of the paratyphoid diseases showed themselves, by 

 giving combined inoculations of killed cultures of all three specific 

 organisms, our troops were protected during the course of the war 

 against typhoid, paratyphoid A and paratyphoid B. This combined 

 inoculation, if I mistake not, was first started in the Army at the 

 instigation of my colleague, Major L. J. Rhea, C.A.M.C, among the 

 Montreal and Quebec troops early in 1915. 



Typhus. — Equally great has been the triumph over another of 

 the great war pestilences. By good fortune, coupled with good 

 sanitation and good feeding, this did not affect our own troops, but 

 it exacted a terrible toll from our brave allies, the Serbs, after they 

 had repulsed the Austrians and gained possession once again, for a 

 time, of their devastated country. War, pestilence and famine 

 coming together mean typhus, accompanied often by relapsing fever. 

 The researches more particularly of Ricketts, the American, who fell 

 a victim to the disease, upon " tabardillo " or Mexican typhus, and of 

 Button and Todd upon an African relapsing fever, indicated very 

 strongly that these two diseases are conveyed from individual to 

 individual by body parasites, and, as our troops learned from bitter 

 personal experience, prominent among these is the body louse. 

 When the disease was at its height the Serbians appealed to the 

 British Government for medical help, and the War Office sent a 

 Commission under Colonel, now General, William Hunter. It is a 

 most fascinating story ; how army and people placed themselves 

 unreservedly under Hunter's control ; how, acting in accordance with 

 these indications, Hunter disinfected a whole people, stopped railway 

 travel for a time so that the infected might not mingle with the 

 disinfected, until the w^hole country had been treated ; how he con- 

 verted railway vans into simple and effective disinfecting chambers ; 

 how he steam-heated all the clothing and bedding ; and how in a few 

 weeks the epidemic was almost absolutely arrested. We did not 

 employ equally drastic methods in France, and as a consequence, until 

 the last few months, it was only certain Divisions that were drastic in 

 their methods that, like the Guards and the Canadians, were effectively 

 deloused. 



Tetanus. — Next to report another victory : — 



AVhen Pasteur was making his classical experiments upon anthrax 

 in cattle, and was engaged in demonstrating — just about the same 

 time as DarAvin was writing his book upon the earth-worm — that 

 these worms convey the spores of the anthrax bacillus from the 

 bodies of infected animals buried in the ground up to the surface 

 (thereby explaining how years later other animals became infected), 

 he noted that while some of the rabbits inoculated under the skin 

 with worm-casts died of anthrax, others died of tetanus. Evidently 



