Febbuakt 22, 1918] 



SCIENCE 



179 



Belgium has been roamed over by ani- 

 mals and manured for over 2,000 years, 

 even before Julius Ccesar conquered and 

 praised the Belgians. The men in the 

 trenches and their clothing are besmeared 

 and bemired with this soil, rich in all kinds 

 of bacteria, including those of tetanus, gas 

 gangrene, etc. When the flesh is torn 

 open by a shell, ragged bits of the muddy 

 clothing or other similarly infected foreign 

 bodies are usually driven into the depths 

 of the wound. Now the tetanus bacilli and 

 the bacilli of "gas-gangrene" are the most 

 virulent of all germs. It takes 225,000,000 

 of the ordinary pus-producing genns to 

 cause an abscess and 1,000,000,000 to kill, 

 while 1,000 tetanus bacilli are enough to 

 kill. This readily explains the frightful 

 mortality of tetanus during the Civil War. 

 It killed 90 patients out of every hundred 

 attacked. 



In the early months of the Great War the 

 armies suddenly placed in the field were so 

 huge that there was not a sufficient supply 

 of the antitoxin of tetanus. Hence a very 

 considerable number of cases of tetanus 

 appeared. Now it is very different. At 

 present every wounded soldier, the moment 

 he reaches a surgeon is given a dose of 

 antitetanic serum. As a result, tetanus has 

 been almost wiped off the slate. I say "al- 

 most," because to be effective the serum 

 must be given within a few hours. The 

 poor fellows who lie for hours and even 

 days in No Man 's Land can not be reached 

 till too late. All the surgeons on both 

 sides concur in saying that tetanus, while 

 it still occurs here emd there, has been prac- 

 tically conquered. 



Every step of this work has been accom- 

 plished hy the bacteriologists arid the sur- 

 geons ivorkin{i together in the laboratory 

 and the hospital. 



Would you seriously advise that no such 

 experimental researches should have been 



carried on and that your boy should suffer 

 the horrible fate of my own poor Gettys- 

 burg boy ? Confess honestly, are not these 

 and other similar researches to be described 

 as humane? — as desirable? — nay, as im- 

 perative ? 



But the antivivisectionists declare that 

 bacteriology is false — that such vaccination 

 is "filling the veins with 'scientific filth' 

 called senim or vaccine"! They are doing 

 their best to persuade our soldiers not to 

 submit to any such "vaccination"! 



Nay, more "we feel," say forty-one of 

 our medical officers on duty in France, 

 ' ' that any one endeavoring to stop the Red 

 Cross from assisting in its humanitarian 

 and humane desire to prevent American 

 soldiers from being diseased, and protect- 

 ing them by solving the peculiar new 

 problems of disease with which the Army 

 is confronted is in reality giving aid and 

 comfort to the enemy." 



Small-pox. — The word vaccination leads 

 me to say a word about small-pox. I con- 

 fess that I was amused by a recent paper in 

 an antivivisection journal entitled "Vacci- 

 nation as a Cause of Small-pox"! During 

 the last year hundi'eds of thousands of sol- 

 diers have been vaccinated against small- 

 pox. Surely there should have been some 

 cases of that disgusting disease if it were 

 caused by vaccination. 



But what are the facts? I have just re- 

 ceived the Report of Surgeon General 

 Gorgas for 1917. The section on Small- 

 pox reminds one of the celebrated chapter 

 on "Snakes in Ireland." On p. 81 on 

 Small-pox in the Army in the United 

 States, I read "No cases of small-pox oc- 

 curred within the United States proper 

 during the year." On p. 175, I read "No 

 cases [of small-pox or varioloid] occurred in 

 the islands" [among the American troops 

 in the Philippines]. On p. 188, I read 

 under Small-pox that "nine cases occurred 



