34 FROM AN EASY CHAIR 



12. Malta Fever 



Mediterranean or Malta fever was for long confused 

 with typhoid and others fevers. Our soldiers and sailors 

 at Malta, Gibraltar, and Cyprus, as well as many 

 frequenters of the African and Asiatic shore, were 

 subject to this disease, and often incapacitated by it. 

 In 1887 Colonel David Bruce discovered in the blood ot 

 patients the minute Micrococcus melitensis, which is its 

 cause, and established the fact that it is a definite 

 independent disease. The hospital at Malta has 

 received as many as 624 patients in a year suffering from 

 Malta fever from among the 8,000 soldiers on the island 

 and the 12,000 sailors on the Mediterranean Station. 

 And as they stay in hospital on an average for four 

 months, this means 74,880 days of illness. This means 

 a considerable loss to the State, as well as a large 

 amount of personal suffering terminated, in some cases 

 arter two years' sickness, by death. 



The War Office, Admiralty, and Colonial Office 

 applied in 1904 to the Royal Society of London to 

 undertake a further investigation of this disease. The 

 society sent out a small commission, which has been at 

 work for three years, and has published seven volumes 

 of reports. The problem before the commission was to 

 discover the mode of infection by the Malta-fever germ 

 (the Micrococcus melitensis), and thus, if possible, to 

 arrive at a means of arresting the infection. Various 

 hypotheses, guesses as to probable and possible methods 

 of dissemination, were entertained and examined. As 

 the germ occurs in the blood, it was naturally considered 

 possible that gnats or other insects were the carrying 

 agent. But negative results followed all experiments in 

 this direction. Then it was found that the " germ " 

 passes out of the body in large quantities by the renal 

 secretion, and it was thought that it might be conveyed 



