444 Biology in America 



tion, or opening of the abdomen of the mother to remove the 

 child, was so fatal that even as late as 1887 Harris, an Amer- 

 ican physician, stated that the operation could be performed 

 more successfully by a mad bull than by the best surgeon in 

 the best hospital in America, supporting his statement, with 

 evidence from nine cases in which the abdomen of pregnant 

 women had been gored by bulls, in five of which the victim 

 recovered, whereas in the eleven Caesarean operations pre- 

 viously performed in New York there were but two recoveries. 

 Today, on the contrary, Caesarean operations are relatively 

 common, and the mortality has been reduced to about two 

 per cent. 



In the days before the practice of antiseptic methods, 

 every woman who entered a maternity hospital truly went 

 down into "the valley of the shadow of death." Conditions 

 in the lying-in hospitals of Europe were horrible in the ex- 

 treme, while in America we were but little better off. For 

 thirty years prior to 1833 in the Pennsylvania Hospital in 

 Philadelphia fifty-six mothers in every thousand were victims 

 of puerperal or child-bed fever, while in the Bellevue Hos- 

 pital in New York in 1872 nine out of every fifty mothers 

 succumbed to the disease, and similar conditions prevailed 

 elsewhere. It was this awful fatality which called forth 

 Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes' famous paper on the "Conta- 

 giousness of Puerperal Fever. ' ' With the coming of antiseptic 

 methods the mortality from this scourge of women has been 

 reduced in good hospitals to less than one-fourth of one per 

 cent, whereas formerly it ranged from two to twenty per cent, 

 or even more. 



But it was not alone the mother who suffered from this 

 dread scourge. The child likewise was its victim, with almost 

 invariably fatal results. Tetanus or lockjaw also levied its 

 toll upon the new-born babes. Today in properly conducted 

 hospitals puerperal fever in infants is almost never seen, 

 while Professor Williams of Johns Hopkins says that he has 

 never seen a case of tetanus in more than 10,000 new-born 

 infants under his care. 



One of the most wide-spread, insidious, and appalling dis- 

 eases common to man is syphilis, the so-called "red plague." 

 Exact data regarding its prevalence in the United States 

 are lacking, but the best available estimates place the figures 

 at from 2% to 20%. If we accept 5% as a fair average, 

 this means that over 250,000 in New York City are victims 

 of the disease. 



Two and twenty-three hundredths per cent of the recruits 

 drafted into our national army in 1917 were found on 

 examination to be infected with gonorrhea, while of 1,300,000 



