1919] on Medicine and the War 435 



It would be wrong, however, to give you a sketch that was all 

 high-lights ; to give these their proper value the uaore sombre back- 

 ground of failures and partial failures must at least be indicated. 

 There are other infections which, notwithstanding abundant and most 

 conscientious laboratory investigations, we have been unable to arrest. 

 Judging from certain letters in the daily press, the ordinary public 

 does not realise the difficulties of bacteriological research, the patient 

 way in which test after test has to be made, one man contributing 

 this little advance, another man another, until the problem is 

 narrowed down until we can predicate the nature of the causative 

 organism, and can then take the proper steps to isolate and discover 

 the means of cultivating that organism and determine its properties 

 and habits, and can devise the proper means of arresting its growth 

 and eradicating it. All this means, too frequently, months and 

 sometimes years of unremitting labour. Influenza, for example, 

 came upon us suddenly, and despite intense laboratory activity in all 

 countries, the end of the War has come and we are still uncertain as 

 to the causative organism. Tens of thousands of cases of bacillary 

 dysentery occurred just along one front in the Gallipoli campaign. 

 Indeed we may, with considerable justice, ascribe the failure of that 

 campaign to the depletion in the ranks from dysentery. Malaria, 

 which, as Sir James Barrett has recently pointed out, caused the 

 failure of Mark Antony's Egyptian campaign, which came to the 

 rescue of Saladin and the defeat of Richard Coeur de Lion and the 

 Crusaders, and gave Napoleon his first defeat at Acre at the hands of 

 a junior British officer, came near to rendering futile both the 

 Salonika and Palestine campaigns. 



Thanks to the brilliant work of Laveran in France, of Sir Ronald 

 Ross in this country and in India, of Celli in Italy, and W. B. 

 MacAllum in Canada and the States, we know the life -history of the 

 malarial parasite, and are fully aware of the fact that destroy the 

 anopheline mosquito — •prevent it from breeding — and a district 

 becomes no longer malarious. When war is conducted in regions 

 where the campaign against the mosquitoes has not been carried out, 

 then inevitably soldiers become infected. In the Salonika area, in 

 Palestine, East Africa and Mesopotamia, our soldiers have fallen 

 victims to malaria truly by the hundreds of thousands, and that just 

 because we cannot wage wars in kid gloves, cannot tuck our soldiers 

 into bed within mosquito curtains at sundown, or confine our opera- 

 tions to upland country away from the swamps where mosquitoes 

 breed. Here is a case in which the end of the war has come and 

 still despite all the research that has been carried out we seem little 

 nearer adequate protection of our troops and triumphant prevention. 

 Yet even here our knowledge of the natural history of the disease 

 has materially helped us, and we were able to reduce the losses from 

 it sufficiently to bring the East African campaign to a victorious 

 conclusion. The most brilliant act of the whole war, Allenby's 



