Section K. 



SANITARY SCIENCE AND HYGIENE. 



President of the Section : 

 PROFESSOR WARREN, M.l.C.E. 



1.— NOTES ON THE ETIOLOGY OF TYPHOID. 



B>j E. O. GIBLIN, M.D. 



In writing- a few notes on Typhoid Fever, more for the 

 sake of eliciting information from others than with any idea 

 that I can add much to the knowledge of those present, my 

 recollection goes back to the year 1862, when the news 

 reached us that typhoid had claimed Prince Albert as a 

 victim ; ten years later, when in London, I well remember 

 the tension of the English people during the illness of the 

 Prince of Wales from the same disease, and vividly recall the 

 lecture which Sir William Gull gave the students of Guy's 

 Hospital after he had received the well-deserved reward of 

 a baronetcy as a recognition of his merit, when with one 

 stroke with chalk drawing an arc on the blackboard to 

 represent twenty-one days' temperature, he tersely remarked, 

 "That's Typhoid Fever"; and now we have daily bulletins 

 cabled all over the world telhng us of the gradual recovery 

 from typhoid of another member of that apparently sus- 

 ceptible family. Unlike smallpox, which has found its 

 master, and is no longer the dreaded scourge it was before 

 the days of Jenner and vaccination, typhoid to-day is 

 found in the house of monarch and subject, of rich and poor 

 alike. In England, the birth-place of sanitary science, no 

 preventive has as yet been discovered, and in Australia and 

 Tasmania it is to-day a dreaded scourge, endemic to the soil, 

 claiming yearly as victims hundreds of our population, 

 principally the bread-winners of the family, the young, active, 

 hard-working, and hard-thinking members of society, and, 

 where the issue is not a fatal one, causing incalculable 

 anxiety and expense. During the past five years, especially 

 in the year 1887, the disease has from time to time appeared 

 in an epidemic and virulent form throughout all the Australian 



