Ge 
posed in open trenches, and in sultry weather millions upon millions of 
flies swarmed on and about this material. 
Short distances away from these trenches were the cooking and din- 
ing tents, and between these two sources of fly attraction the insects were 
continually passing. Thus it was made only too easy for the flies to trans- 
fer infectious material from the trenches to the food; and as much of the 
food is not cooked at all, there is no chance for the germs to be killed. 
To show the condition of affairs in the camps, as described by an eye 
witness, I will quote from a letter of Dr. I. W. Heysinger, of Philadelphia, 
to one of the medical journals: “In the hospitals, the vessels used by 
the patients beside their beds, were black with them (flies), and they only 
disappeared when the dinners were brought along, and the attendants 
went back to the cook house to chase off the invading inhabitants there, 
and bring up milk to complete the menu. The open sinks are also black 
with these buzzing scavengers, which rise in clouds when the surface is 
disturbed, and their feet loaded with fecal debris rise to seek new pastures 
at breakfast, dinner and supper and all through the day, intermittently 
around the cook house. 
“Into these sinks go the discharges of the typhoid patients, and patho- 
genic bacteria that can not make an effective culture there on a most 
majestic scale are ‘simply not in it.’ 
“Can anyone wonder that a single case of typhoid will thus infect a 
a whole camp and increase the virulence of a mild case to the point of a 
necessarily mortal result? Ingenuity could not devise any plan so simple, 
so efficacious and so widespread as this for scattering a pestilence. Every 
fly leg is good for a large number of almost any required sort of patho- 
genic bacilli, and some flies are nearly all legs, and the rest snout and 
wings, which also play their part with regularity and despatch.” Dr. 
M. A. Veeder, of Lyons, N. Y., describes the conditions around a pri- 
vate house. He says: ‘‘Even in a private house, not at all uncleanly, lL 
have seen typhoid dejections emptied from a commode, and the latter 
thoughtlessly left standing, without disinfection, within a few feet of a 
pitcher of milk just left at the door, both the commode and the pitcher 
attracting the flies, which swarmed about and went from one to the other. 
Is it strange that there were numerous cases of the disease in that house, 
and in the house next to it? I have seen a shallow, old-fashioned water- 
closet fairly buzzing with flies on a hot day, and all around it open win- 
