108 TYPHUS FEVER 



Other American medical men and nurses have given their lives in 

 the combat with this disease in desolated Serbia and others still are 

 there and elsewhere in war-scourged Europe, seeking not to destroy 

 but to save lives, fighting under the great battle flag of humanity and 

 science. 



Quite independently of the work of Nicolle, Anderson and Gold- 

 berger, Ricketts and Wilder, Conner! and others studied the etiology 

 of typhus in Mexico. They found that the disease could be trans- 

 mitted from man to the lower monkeys, without passage through a 

 chimpanzee, that the virus in the blood is removed by nitration through 

 porcelain, that one attack in the monkey gives immunity and that 

 Nicolle was right in his claim that the disease is transmitted by the 

 body louse. All attempts to transfer the disease by fleas and bed bugs 

 have failed, while those with the head louse (Pediculis capitis) have 

 not given uniform results. 



For some years Brill has observed a peculiar disease in the wards 

 of Mount Sinai Hospital, New York, and up to the present time he 

 has records of about three hundred cases. Brill has described this 

 disease as follows: 



An acute infectious disease of unknown origin and unknown pathology, 

 characterized by an incubation period of from four to five days, a period of 

 continuous fever, accompanied by intense headache, apathy, and prostration, a 

 profuse and extensive erythematous maculo-papular eruption, all of about two 

 weeks duration, whereupon the fever abruptly ceases either by crisis within 

 a few hours or by rapid lysis within three days. 



Anderson and Goldberger have shown that Brill's disease is typhus 

 fever by injecting the blood of patients into monkeys and thereby 

 establishing immunity to typhus. 



Nicolle has reduced typhus in Tunis from 838 cases in 1909 to 22 

 cases in 1912. The only measure employed consists in freeing the 

 people of lice. 



THE ORGANISM 



Plotz has isolated the organism and with Olitsky and Baeher has 

 shown by complement fixation and agglutination tests that he has, 

 most probably, found the infecting agent. In the agglutination tests 

 only positive reactions in dilutions 1 : 50 were considered. 



