1910] 



on Medicine and the War 



431 



doses of the broth in which tetanus bacilH have been grown, and into 

 which thej have discliarged their most potent poisons or toxins, we 

 can render these horses immune to tetanus, so that eventually they 

 will stand doses of the living bacilli and their toxins sufficient to kill 

 a thousand horses, and having thus raised their immunity to a very 

 high degree, the fluid of their blood (their blood serum) is found to 

 neutralise the tetanus poison, so that injected into an animal along 

 with several times the fatal dose of tetanus toxin, or along with the 

 actual bacilli, nothing happens — or rather the animal shows no ill 

 effects. Lockjaw has for long years been so rare in civil practice in 

 England that we were wholly unprepared in 1914 to encounter it as 



3a 



2a 



10 



INCIDENCE OF 

 CASES OF 

 TETANUS 

 IN BRITISH 

 WOUNDED 

 PER MILLE 



Bb ■-i,_«B-ll« 1. 



■■■wiIbB 



SONP J rWAHJ J A3 wo JTMAMJJASON 

 1914 1915 



Fig. 2. 



a frequent condition among the wounded, the more so as it was 

 almost unknown in the South African War. But the soil on the 

 veldt is very different from that, in the highly cultivated and highly 

 manured districts of France. When in 1914 our troops got down to 

 the Marne, and still more later in the Aisne area, they fought over 

 ground that had been cultivated for long generations. Presently 

 case after case of those wounded in this area and transferred to the 

 general hospitals on the French sea-board, or to England, manifested 

 this terrible and most fatal complication. I should explain that it is 

 days and often weeks before it shows itself, and mercifully this long 

 incubation period gives us our opportunity to protect the individual. 



