306 THE NEW WORLD OF SCIENCE 



better position to prevent its spread than before the war. The 

 single improvement, if such it can be called, is in our present 

 appreciation of its importance, and of the necessity for further 

 research, as to its cause, in order that we may have knowledge 

 to prevent or at least to control its spread, most probably by 

 the discovery of a suitable vaccine. 



Simple, uncomplicated measles is probably a mild and almost 

 harmless infection, but unfortunately complications are common 

 and severe, the most important being pneumonia. In this war 

 the pneumonia was studied as have been the ordinary or lobar 

 pneumonias, and it was early learned that the inflammation of 

 the lung was of quite a different character; that is, was ordi- 

 narily caused by the type four pneumococci, or even more 

 frequently by the haemolytic streptococcus. The last named, 

 organism is the cause of some forms of septicemia, of erysipelas, 

 of puerperal fever, and of many wound infections, all these 

 conditions being serious and often fatal. The pneumonias 

 caused by this organism were frequently complicated with 

 empyema, and were very fatal. Many studies of the complica- 

 tions of measles were made in all our larger camps where the 

 disease prevailed, by the foremost investigators of the country, 

 and the importance of the disease, from a military standpoint 

 was realized as never before, and we may reasonably expect 

 some solution of the riddle of the disease, provided the science 

 of bacteriology and of immunology is sufficiently far advanced 

 to furnish us with a workable technique for its study. At the 

 present time the chief stumbling block is the practical impossi- 

 bility of producing the disease in animals. This limits the 

 experimental work which can be done quite sharply. 



INFLUENZA AND ITS COMPLICATIONS 



Pestilences of one kind or another are popularly supposed to 

 follow upon the heels of war, and history does indeed show 

 many such associations, as, when, for example, smallpox spread 

 through France during the Franco-Prussian War, and through 



