MILITARY MEDICINE CHAMBERLAIN. 247 



is too well known to need description; Capt. E. D. Vedder, who in 

 my laboratory in Manila performed the experiments with emetin and 

 amoeba, which led Leonard Rogers to undertake the hypodermic treat- 

 ment of amoebiasis with that drug. Capt. Vedder and myself in 

 Manila carried out extensive investigations on beriberi, and were the 

 first to show that the extremely fatal infantile beriberi was promptly 

 curable by the use of an extract of rice bran or polishings. While 

 the English and the Germans were the pioneers in developing the 

 antityphoid inoculation, it was through the enthusiasm and energy 

 of Maj. F. F. Russell, of our medical corps, that the practice was 

 introduced and made compulsory in the United States Army. Our 

 service was the first in which compulsory antityphoid vaccination 

 was employed, and the demonstration that the scourge of armies 

 could be eradicated as a result of this measure stands as one of the 

 greatest triumphs of preventive medicine. 



Among others in our own service whose names will be remembered 

 should be mentioned Gen. George M. Sternberg, formerly Surgeon 

 General of the Army, and who has but recently died. Sternberg was 

 a pioneer in bacteriology in this country, and his book on that sub- 

 ject was for many years a standard work of reference. He was par- 

 ticularly interested in the subject of yellow fever, and it was due to 

 this interest that the board of Army medical officers was appointed 

 which disclosed the method of transmission of that disease. 



Among those members of our Army medical service who subse- 

 quently became prominent because of work outside the practice of 

 medicine and surgery may be mentioned Maj. Gen. F. C. Ainsworth, 

 who was for many years Adjutant General of the Army, and Maj. 

 Gen. Leonard Wood, a graduate of Harvard, who for high executive 

 ability has been promoted to many important posts. Col. John Shaw 

 Billings has been pronounced by competent authority to be the most 

 eminent bibliographer in the history of medicine. He served with 

 great credit as surgeon through the Civil War, and in 1864 was trans- 

 ferred to Washington for duty, where he remained till his retire- 

 ment in 1895. His name is indelibly associated with the upbuilding 

 of the Library of the Surgeon General of the Army, which through 

 his energy became the largest medical library in the world, and also 

 with his index catalogue of this library. With Fletcher he edited 

 the Index Medicus for 20 years. The trustees of the Johns Hopkins 

 fund in 1876 elected him as their medical advisor after having 

 accepted his designs for the Johns Hopkins Hospital as the most 

 satisfactory of any submitted. In 1896, one year after his retirement 

 from active service, he became superintendent in chief of the New 

 York Public Library, where he solved the enormous difficulties con- 

 nected with the consolidation of the New York libraries and the 



