TYPHUS FEVER IN RUSSIA 



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only will it kill them if .they are exposed to its fumes, but 

 traces of it drive them away. Hence doctors and nurses 

 who have to handle typhus patients or their clothes have 

 only to wear a small muslin bag of sulphur under their 

 garments, or to rub themselves with a little sulphur oint- 

 ment in order to be perfectly guarded against infection ; 

 the louse will not approach them, nor remain upon them 

 should it accidentally effect a lodgment. 



It is not always obvious at once in what way a know- 

 ledge of the mode of carriage of a deadly disease can be of 

 service to humanity. But in this case it is strikingly and 

 triumphantly clear. In the vast poverty-stricken popu- 

 lation of Russia typhus is still common. Public medical 

 officials attend these cases, and the Russian Govern- 

 ment keeps a record of the annual deaths of its medical 

 staff, and of the causes of their deaths. In the first 

 six months of last year 530 Russian medical officers died, 

 and twenty-four of these deaths were caused by typhus 

 fever acquired by these devoted public servants in attend- 

 ance upon cases of that fever. Henceforth they will 

 make use of sulphur or sulphurous ointment to keep the 

 little infection-carriers at a distance, and not one medical 

 man or nurse will catch the disease, still less be killed 

 by it. 



A remarkable fact in this history is that the actual 

 parasitic germ which causes typhus, whether a bacterium 

 (Schizophyte) or a protozoon, has not been detected, 

 although the louse has been shown to be its " carrier." 

 The same is true of yellow-fever : we have not seen with 

 the microscope the microbe which produces it. But we 

 know with certainty that the gnat, Stegomya fasciata, and 

 no other, is the carrier of the unseen germ, and that we 

 can obliterate that fever by obliterating the gnat. So, 

 too, although we know how the infection of rabies acts, 

 and how it is carried, yet no one has yet isolated and 



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