246 ANNUAL REPORT SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION, 1918. 



The greatest of Russian surgeons, and one of the greatest military 

 surgeons of all times, was Nikolas Ivanovich Pirogoff, born in 1810, 

 and who, like Pare and Hunter, had a remarkable career of self-de- 

 velopment. He served in the Caucasus in 1849, in the Crimea in 

 1854, and also reported on the Franco-Prussian and Turco-Russian 

 campaigns. He defined war as a " traumatic epidemic." He intro- 

 duced female nursing of the wounded in the Crimea and was a warm 

 advocate of freedom and higher education for women. In his 

 treatise on military surgery, published in 1864, he holds large hospi- 

 tals responsible for the spread of epidemic disease, and recommends 

 small pavilions and segregation. His method of complete osteo- 

 plastic amputation of the foot is well known to all surgeons. 



Friedrich von Esmarch, the great German military surgeon, intro- 

 duced the first-aid dressing and standardized surgical hemostasis bj r 

 the Esmarch bandage. He did much to improve the status of mili- 

 tary surgery and the first-aid treatment of wounds. By marrying a 

 royal princess he became uncle to the present Kaiser. Turning from 

 the realm of the wounded we find that Emil von Behring, whose 

 name is ever associated with antitoxin, began his career as a Prussian 

 army surgeon. In 1880 the epoch-making discovery of the malarial 

 Plasmodium was made by Alphonse Laveran, a French army surgeon. 

 The importance of the discovery of Plasmodium was equaled by the 

 demonstration of mosquito transmission made by Eonald Ross, a 

 surgeon in the Indian Army Medical Service. After years of patient 

 work he was able to trace the full development of an avian parasite 

 in culex and partly that of the human malarial parasite in anopheles. 

 Zieman, a naval surgeon, was the first to confirm the work of Ross 

 and the Italian observers. More recently much important and 

 original work on malaria, as well as on entamoeba, has been done by 

 Capt. Charles F. Craig, of our own medical corps, who has written 

 several monographs on these subjects. Capt. Craig, in association 

 with Maj. Percy M. Ashburn, was the first to establish the truth of 

 Graham's theory that dengue fever is transmitted by the bite of mos- 

 quitoes of the genus culex. 



Our knowledge of tropical medicine was enormously advanced by 

 Col. Sir W. P. Leishman and by Maj. Charles Donovan, both of the 

 British service, who independently discovered that the so-called dum- 

 dum fever, or Kala-Azar, was due to an intracellular parasite, which 

 has been named, in honor of its discoverers, Leishmania donovani. 

 The name Col. Leishman is also associated with one of our well- 

 known polychrome stains. 



Other names intimately associated with tropical and preventive 

 medicine are those of the naval surgeons Mormand and Bovay, who 

 first described the parasite of Cochin-China diarrhea; Maj. Bailey 

 K. Ashford, of our Army, whose work on hookworms in Porto Rico 



