PREVENTIVE MEDICINE AND THE WAR 347 



when recruits were received. These diseases showed much 

 higher rates in the home camps than in the A. E. F. While 

 this curse was by no means eliminated in our armies in France, 

 the low rate is a credit to the morals of our sons and the ef- 

 ficiency of medical officers. 



Naturally there was but little malaria in the A. E. F. Those 

 who came into the home camps bearing the parasites of this 

 disease were for the most part sterilized with quinine before 

 going to France. 



Pneumonia was the most prolific cause of death in all our 

 armies in every country and at all seasons. The morbidity 

 rates from this disease ran from October, 1917, to September, 

 1918, about on the same level, crossing and recrossing, but 

 never separating widely, in the A. E. F. and the home camps. 



With the advent of the virulent influenza in September, 1918, 

 both lines made an abrupt ascent, but the peak of the curve 

 representing the home troops reaches nearly six times the 

 height of that for the A. E. F. Why this great difference? 

 The divisions constituting the A. E. F. in October, 1918, had 

 occupied the home camps the winter before and had left their 

 most susceptible men in the hospitals and cemeteries in this 

 country when they went abroad. Those who filled the home 

 camps in the fall of 1918 were for the most part recently drawn 

 from their scattered homes in which they had never come in 

 contact with the bacteria of crowd diseases. Our statistical 

 data, morbidity and mortality curves, fail to give us the real 

 facts. They do not show the relative percentage of immunes 

 in the two bodies which we are comparing nor do they indicate 

 the losses by sickness and death incurred in the transforma- 

 tion of new into seasoned troops. 



Seasoned soldiers, as represented by our troops in France, 

 bore even a new infection that of influenza better than 

 their raw comrades in this country. This suggests that there 

 exists a non-specific immunity, which is of value, but is tran- 

 sitory, fluctuating in its protective power and hardly comparable 

 with specific immunity such as has been secured in typhoid 



